The Tooth Fairy

It seems that this week's reviews have both asked me to reach in for my inner child. I did my best--especially with this movie, Michael Lembeck's The Tooth Fairy. I'm going to make a wild guess (or hope) that not too many grown adults will be interested in seeing a tooth fairy movie featuring The Rock, a pink tutu, and as many tooth puns as can be crammed into 102 minutes. So, I tried to watch with kids and parents in mind. I even realize that anyone, adult or child, walking into this film would not be expecting intellectual stimulation. Even while keeping all of this in mind, I still couldn't recommend this to anyone.

Dwayne Johnson plays Derek Thompson, a minor league hockey player who has been titled, "The Tooth Fairy" for his talent at extracting an opponent's teeth whilst body checking him. He's not a particularly good hockey player having not attempted a shot in years. Despite his smiles and child-like joking, Derek is bitter about his lack of success in a passive aggressive sort of way. He has a tendency to kill kids' dreams by telling them to lower their expectations so as not to experience the inevitable failure. I would think he is passing on the lessons he's taken from his own life to a younger generation. The movie says he does it because he's a meanie-head. After making the grave sin of trying to tell his girlfriend's (Ashley Judd) six year old daughter (Destiny Whitlock) that the Tooth Fairy isn't real, Derek is summoned to Fairyland. There he is sentenced to several weeks as a Tooth Fairy. Stephen Merchant is delightful as Derek's case worker and Julie Andrews musters up a surprising amount of dignity in those wings as she plays, Lily, the Head Fairy.

I have the same problem with this movie's mythos as I did with The Santa Clause trilogy, incidentally, the second and third of which were also directed by Michael Lembeck. If real live tooth fairies were flitting around taking teeth from underneath children's pillows and replacing them with cash and in the same world, parents are doing the SAME THING, wouldn't someone notice? Wouldn't thousands of parents notice that someone had beaten them to the exchange? The next question I had was about what the tooth fairies do with all those teeth. According to the tooth fairy mission statement, they exist solely to cultivate the imagination of children. I wonder if they turn the teeth into dollar bills. That would explain where they get all that cash, but would have the unfortunate side effect of inflating the economy. I know I promised not to think too much, but I can only dim the lights up there so far.

Besides being dumb, The Tooth Fairy is also uninteresting. You've seen this movie. Every step has been taken. Even a kid too young to understand cliché won't be that entertained because it wasn't all that funny. I will be honest; there was one scene involving a couple's mistaken conclusion when an invisible Derek walks around their living room that had me laughing out loud. The rest was a series of tooth and fairy jokes. I'll admit something else: I like Dwayne Johnson. And not just because he's gorgeous. He's got the personality and screen presence to be a successful actor. I mentioned to someone else that I had seen this movie. His response was a question as to why studios like to emasculate Dwayne Johnson. We thought about it and decided not to feel too bad about it because he chooses these roles. He does it to himself.