Make no mistake, writers Jack Amiel and Michael Begler can write funny scenes and, save the genre-appropriate chick-flick cornball humor, \The Prince and Me"" is a funny movie. But at its heart the movie is an inconsistent, muddled and entirely unromantic romantic comedy.
Amiel and Begler have the romantic comedy premise down: A girl unready for love-in this case studious Julia Stiles-and a boy whose bumbling fails to impress the girl for whom he's destined to fall-Luke Mably's lust-filled Prince Edward. But the script never conveys the plot the writers are aiming at. That Stiles suddenly questions their relationship because being queen would get in the way of her ambitions makes no sense because she never acts driven. Too much of what happens is implied or brushed over and not enough is shown. Too little of the romance between Mably and Stiles is included in the movie.
For all missteps with the plot, the scenes that don't seem to advance the story have the kind of good-natured humor that can make a good chick flick into a great one. But when ""The Prince and Me"" tries to build a context for anything, it fails. Well-paced, funny conversations sour every time the film tries to use them to move forward.
If this movie has any heart, it is because Stiles appears at her most endearing throughout the film. She plays the small-town, rags-to-riches girl better than the script wrote it, cocking half-smiles at all the right moments. Stiles maneuvers through this script more aptly than her co-star, who admittedly has to put up with on-the-fly Shakespeare quotings and clumsy attempts to look slick.
The script problems extend to the movie's sense of place. There is a fine line between setting a movie in a state and pandering to its residents, and ""Prince's"" Wisconsin references are forced. People say Rocky Rococo when they mean pizza, parents with cameras tell their kids to ""Say cheese curds,"" and beer drinkers pronounce each syllable of Leinenkugel's. It's four hours of Wisconsin uncomfortably jammed into a two-hour movie; although flattering, entirely unnecessary.
Amiel and Begler have a lot of potential, but a lot of kinks to work out. ""The Prince and Me"" fails to be more than a halfhearted date movie.
