Kind of a cross between The Princess Bride and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,Stardust is an eye-poppingly elaborate fantasy that's shot through with action-movie adrenaline and attitude. Not surprising, since director Matthew Vaughan's prior film, his directorial debut (after a stint as Guy Ritchie's producer), was the slam-bang gangster picture Layer Cake.
Based on a graphic novel by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess, Stardust doesn't quite reach the heights of verbal wit Bride did, and it can't match Munchausen's gargantuan anarchic spirit. But at its best it charms and stuns in ways pleasantly reminiscent of those films. Opening with the stentorian tones of narrator Sir Ian McKellan asking us if we've ever considered the possibility that the stars in the night sky look down on us as we look up at them, the movie in quite short order introduces an English village named Wall, the magical kingdom next door called Stormhold, a love-besotted young man named Tristan (Cox), and a fallen star in woman's form named Yvaine (Danes). This star has been plucked from the sky by a magic ruby, which has been hurled into the sky by Stormhold's treacherous dying king (O'Toole), who charges his sons (who, in keeping with family tradition, are always knocking each other off) with retrieving the stone and the star in order to determine who the next king will be. Tristan, meanwhile, has promised the beautiful but unfathomably shallow and venal girl he thinks he loves (played, most convincingly, by Miller), that he will venture into Stormhold to capture the fallen star and bring it to her to prove his love. Joining the murderous princes and Tristan on the star quest is centuries-old witch Lamia (Pfeiffer), who wants to capture the Yvaine and dine on her heart, so as to regain her youth. Tristan gets to Yvaine first, and while the sometimes glowing Yvaine is initially put off by the callow youth, their adventures as they escape ever more fearsome menaces brings them — duh — closer and closer.
Sounds complicated, huh? I haven't even gone into the stuff about Tristan's mother, Lamia's sisters, the ghosts of the Stormhold princes who follow the action around, the unicorn, Ditchwater Sal, and the flying Lightning Catchers led by one Captain Shakespeare (De Niro), who's not quite the monster he pretends to be for the sake of his "reputation." Just as Danny Boyle's Sunshine seems to partake gluttonously of every sci-fi movie ever made, so Stardust sometimes feels like an overstuffed piñata of fantasy tropes, some taken more seriously than others. With a less assured director in charge, Stardust's freewheelingness would make for one woozy mess, but as Vaughan demonstrated with Layer Cake, he can shift so smoothly between goofy and gruesome that you don't feel a thing that he doesn't want you to. That his cast — including, surprisingly, the usually self-serious Danes — keeps things light while enacting the most outrageous of characterizations is entirely appropriate then. Even when Pfeiffer's at her most villainous and under layers of awful-old-lady makeup, she's got a winking playfulness that's pretty delightful. On the other hand, I can't imagine hardcore Taxi Driver/Raging Bull fans deriving much pleasure from De Niro's latest sendup of his former personae — but Analyze This fans probably will, and any studio exec will be happy to tell you which of those three movies made the most money.
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READ MORE: Claire Danes Gets Stardust in Her Eyes
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