STARDUST (2007) *1/2 If you like fantasy as a genre, this has all of the elements, and isn't bad--in fact, at points it's very good, and it all looks right (if there's such thing as fantasy looking "right"). If you're like me, however, and more tolerate fantasy flicks than leap at their release…and really need something more…a major dramatic dynamic, great humor or some originality…you should probably look for it elsewhere. I understand that there is a sizable minority, some quasi-cross-section of the viewing world that will find it well worth watching just to get a sense of what the ravages of….say the next 80 years…will do to even a beauty of the magnitude of Michelle Pfeiffer. They will be either not disappointed, or duly horrified, or whatever. They do a great job on her-often dramatic-transformations, and she does a good enough impersonation of a slightly sympathetic wicked witch that it's very difficult to vote against her. Charlie Cox and Claire Danes are more annoying than anything else for most of the film-which in real life hardly trumps evil as something be avoided, but in cinema is akin to mortal illness. They do pick it up at the end to at least the degree that you've happy enough about the inevitable happy ending (for most of the film their main virtue is that they aren't Sienna Miller), but don't leave you thinking about 'em much. Instead there's Peter O'Toole's wonderfully wicked comic book Machiavelli impersonation and-even more than that-Robert De Niro doing things brilliantly that we've seen him do brilliantly in better cinematic surroundings. But wait, more than that!, there's also De Niro don't things we haven't seen him do before, and quite well and in a most amusing manner. It's still not enough to overcome the sorrow of the great man being stuck, forever, in the celluloid of a film like this, but it takes out a lot of the immediate pain of viewing.
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