What a Girl Wants

Directed by Dennie Gordon, What a Girl Wants follows Amanda Bynes’ Daphne Reynolds as she travels to England to meet her biological father (Colin Firth’s Henry Dashwood) – with Daphne’s visit eventually (and inevitably) complicating Henry’s run for British Parliament. It’s a perfectly serviceable premise that is, for the most part, employed to ineffective and uninvolving effect by Gordon, as the filmmaker, armed with a screenplay by Jenny Bicks and Elizabeth Chandler, delivers an often unreasonably sluggish endeavor that contains few elements designed to capture and sustain the viewer’s ongoing interest – with the arms-length atmosphere compounded by a wheel-spinning narrative and Bynes’ irritatingly larger-than-life performance. (Firth’s typically appealing turn stands in sharp contrast to Bynes’ relentless mugging, for sure.) And while the movie possesses all of the ingredients required for a story of this ilk, including a romantic subplot between Bynes’ Daphne and Oliver James’ hopelessly bland Ian, What a Girl Wants, saddled with a thoroughly unreasonable 105 minute running time, builds towards a distressingly anticlimactic and underwhelming third act that’s hardly as satisfying as Gordon has undoubtedly intended – with the end result a mostly intolerable piece of work that seems unlikely to appeal to young girls.

*1/2 out of ****