In typical Lizzie spirit, it's harmless, it's sweet, it's corny, it's fun and it all comes out impossibly right.
A Cinderella Story (2004)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:96
Fresh:10
Rotten:86
Average Rating:3.6/10
Consensus: An uninspired, generic updating of the classic fairy tale.
Runtime: 1 hr 36 mins
Genre: Comedies
Synopsis: Hilary Duff plays Sam, a good-hearted Cinderella stuck in the fairy-tale-gone-wrong atmosphere of modern-day Los Angeles. Enslaved by an evil, BOTOX-junky step-mom (a hilarious Jennifer Coolidge)... Hilary Duff plays Sam, a good-hearted Cinderella stuck in the fairy-tale-gone-wrong atmosphere of modern-day Los Angeles. Enslaved by an evil, BOTOX-junky step-mom (a hilarious Jennifer Coolidge) Sam is forced to scrub floors at her late father's diner, thus earning the eternal disdain of the snooty popular kids in school. Luckily she has a friend in artsy nerd Carter (Dan Byrd), and a text-message romance with some poetic schoolmate she's never met. She also has a fairy godmother in the sweet diner manager (Regina King), who helps Sam get decked out and disguised for the Halloween dance. At the dance, she discovers her prince is one of the popular kids, Austin Ames (Chad Michael Murray). Happily ever after seems like a long shot, though, because Austin is burdened by pressures at school and at home, and Sam can't shake her "diner girl" inferiority complex. This fairy tale comes with plenty of wit, style, and heart. It moves along too fast to be sappy, and broadly razzes the shallowness of popular kids, their stupid parents, and whiny siblings in a way that should balm the unhealed wounds of anyone who's ever been to high school. Byrd makes a winning and somewhat cool nerd, Murray shows princely posture as the tortured poet-quarterback, and Duff firmly establishes herself as a first-rate young actress with luminous major-league screen presence. [More]
Starring: Hilary Duff, Chad Michael Murray, Dan Byrd, Jennifer Coolidge
Starring: Hilary Duff, Chad Michael Murray, Dan Byrd, Jennifer Coolidge, Regina King
Director: Mark Rosman
Director: Mark Rosman
Screenwriter: Leigh Dunlap
Producer: Clifford Werber, Ilyssa Goodman, Hunt Lowry, Dylan Sellers
Composer: Christophe Beck
Studio: Warner Bros.
Reviews for A Cinderella Story
The timeless fairy tale is updated into a cookie-cutter specimen of the teen-girl comedy.
Thanks to a charming cast and several bubbly moments, adults in the audience may find themselves genuinely entertained by the pleasantly feathery story.
A Cinderella Story misfires as a comedy and offers no fresh twists or clever turns on this ancient fairy tale.
Writer Leigh Dunlap and director Mark Rosman tart up their Cinderella variation with the predictable accoutrements of teen comedies.
Under the charmless direction of Mark Rosman, the actors seem to be frozen at the rehearsal stage, with the blessed exception of a sublimely funny Jennifer Coolidge as the Botoxed horror of a stepmother.
I'm too much of a man to enjoy this movie ... Remarkably, Duff is not annoying.
Duff needed to channel TV-Lizzie for this role, but instead she gives us milquetoast.
If you let them, studio executives will take endless advantage of the fact that many kids have no discernment whatsoever, as will Hilary's producer-mother.
Mostly boring, sometimes quite clumsy, and never particularly interesting.
When not unnecessarily bland, synthetic, and indistinguishable from undistinguished teen TV, A Cinderella Story is unnecessarily coarse and dumbed down, with every character except Sam and Austin subject to perfunctory ridicule.
Stock characters played broadly in a script rife with cliché plot devices and a bad case of the blands
It’s got enough humor to get a smirk about every five minutes, but also has enough cheesiness and stupidity that I’ll have forgotten all about the movie in about a week.
Modern footwear simply doesn't fit this perennial fairy tale heroine, who's been reborn as a Valley Girl in a rendition that stumbles in almost every conceivable way.
A bibbidy- bobbidy- bomb... more pumpkin than gilded coach, more smelly sneaker than glass slipper.
Lacks the guiltily pleasurable panache (and punch) of other recent chickadee flicks posited as protofeminist fairy tales.
Clearly a movie that is aiming strictly for its target audience of young girls.
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June 22, 2004:
How would Cinderella meet her prince in a modern-day retelling? On the Internet, duh! ![]()
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