The Prince and Me: Charmingly Disarming

Starring: Julia Stiles, Luke Mably
Category: Romantic Comedy, Romance

Let's get one thing straight. This is light material. This is eye candy. And romance at it's most romantic. Which girl never dreamt about her own prince charming? And to have the boy that you are in love with turn into one is a bonus. Big time. Plus he wasn't a frog to begin with.
Julia Stiles is amazing and beautiful in her own wonderful way. She is totally believable as Paige Morgan, the driven country girl out to be the doctor she wants to be. In fact, Julia's beauty is that she can be plain jane and beautiful at the same time. Luke does an ok job overall but did his best work when he was in the meeting with labor reps and business heads.

However it is unfortunate several things happened that failed to lift this movie from run-of-the-mill to a classic. Let's run through them.

First. Poor secondary character development. Neither Paige's friends nor Zoren is properly developed. Zoren had the most opportunity but only showed flashes of it in the scene where he describes how the palace caught fire. Paige's friends also had potential and were probably well developed, character-wise in pre-production. They just wasn't used.

Since this is not a high-minded movie, let's not pretend that it is. Realism here will not help, espcially when there is a prince involved. So, let's take Pretty Woman as an example. Very good secondary charaters. Even when they have limited screen time. Everybody remembers the store manager that tried to suck up to Richard Gere's Edward. And who can forget Laura San Giacomo's Kit, the best friend to Julia Robert's character. Maybe there were too many and there wasn't time to develop them.

Cody Banks 2: Destination London

Starring: Frankie Muniz, Anthony Anderson, Hannah Spearritt
Category: Parody, Adventure

If there was an example of a pointless sequel, this is it. It piles on more of what some Hollywood exec thought why Cody Banks was popular (over-the-top action, babes, cool gadgets... well mostly action) and cut out almost all the stuff that made the first one so likeable (fish-out-of-water-ness, balancing act between the spy-life and the real life, comedy and most important of all, fallibility).
This Cody Banks can't seem to fail and in the process becomes a cartoon character and looses his appeal. I respect Frankie for his efforts, if you want to become a cartoon character, you have to have an outlanding character. Case in point, Mr.Gov of California. Look at the Terminator movies, True Lies and to some degree, Eraser. But even he couldn't save The Last Action Hero.
If you want to follow a formula, you can't loose some of the ingredients and expect the same thing.