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Brendan Fraser plays a man who can bring book characters to life in &quot;Inkheart.&quot;

If you're a pre-teen girl, go see "Inkheart" -- I'm fairly certain you'll like it. (And kudos to you for reading a newspaper.) If you're not a pre-teen girl, recommending Iain Softley's screen version of Cornelia Funke's novel "Inkheart" gets considerably tougher.

The premise itself is a little worn -- people known as "silvertongues" pop characters out of stories and into the real world if they read the story aloud. The questions that arise from that setup are sufficiently interesting to make it a great writing exercise for elementary and middle school kids. What would happen if Goldilocks suddenly showed up at your house? How would the Gingerbread man fare running through the halls of your school? What havoc could the Big Bad Wolf cause at the grocery store -- and more interesting -- how does he feel about being there? It's a fun (and often funny) exercise, but the kids I've been working with for the past couple of years often churn out more interesting adventures than what we've got here with "Inkheart."

I suppose part of the problem is that few of the storybook characters that land up on "the outside" bring with them any inherent context. Outside of Toto the little black dog and Farid (Rafi Gavron -- somebody put this kid on the cover of Tigerbeat), of "Open Sesame" fame, the characters that materialize in our world are from a book that doesn't exist.


And that'd be fine if we got more information about the book that's central to everyone's existence. But we don't.

Instead, we're stuck in the "real" world.

Mo (Brendan Fraser) is a silvertongue who discovered his talent the same night he lost his wife, Resa (Sienna Guillory). Just as matter can neither be created nor destroyed, if you take a character out of a book, somebody from the real world's gotta go in. In reading aloud to his little daughter, Mo inadvertently sent his wife into the pages of "Inkheart" and brought fire juggler Dustfinger (a very ripped Paul Bettany) into his backyard. The book is subsequently stolen from Mo.

For the next nine years, Mo travels the world in search of another copy of "Inkheart" so he can read Resa back into the family, keeping his wife's whereabouts and his magic powers a secret from even his daughter, Meggie (Eliza Bennett). In a little shop (German, maybe), Mo finds the book and seconds later, bumps into Dustfinger, who's been following him. Other people have been read out of "Inkheart," including the ultimate baddie, Capricorn (a wild-eyed Andy Serkis). And Capricorn, delighted with the real world's "guns, phones and ... duct tape" wants both the book and the silvertongue so he can bring the real baddie -- The Shadow -- out.

Mo grabs Meggie and hightails it to a sprawling mansion in either Italy or Spain where Meggie's great-aunt Elinor (Helen Mirren) lives like a shut-in. Elinor is everything that pops to mind when you think of the moneyed, childless great-aunt kind of character: She's a well-heeled, tense, selfish old maid who's bad with children, but makes the occasional attempt to connect.

Capricorn's henchmen have been brought out of "Inkheart" by another silvertongue, but since the dude stutters, the characters arrive mangled in some manner. These henchmen arrive at Elinor's palatial casa, torch the library (the horror!) and kidnap everybody, forcing Mo to tell the truth to his daughter and Elinor. Soon, even the author gets mixed into the adventure.

The rest of the story is essentially a series of kidnappings, escapes, captures, rescue missions and unsubtle messages about the wonders of reading until the grand finale, which I won't wreck.

And again, if I was 10 or 12 years old, I know I'd enjoy the magical element of "Inkheart." I'd think Meggie was so pretty and the messages about the power of writing and the true bliss that comes from exploring other worlds through books completely divine, because those notions would have been new to me. Now those ideas are fully entrenched and I want more -- I want the worlds I read about and the worlds I see onscreen to teach me something about the complexities of being human, perhaps even give me ideas about how to navigate my life. But "Inkheart's" characters are flat, their conflicts feel very simple and the messages kinda elementary.

We go to the movies for lots of reasons, but more often than not, it's because some part of us wants to pop out of our world and into another one. When you put that idea out as the main plot device, you need to back it up with a little extra-extra. You need to get all "Wizard of Oz" or "Neverending Story" on us. That being said, if I HAD a 12-year-old girl, I'd probably take her to "Inkheart." And then I'd send her back to the library for something heftier to cleanse the palate.

Contact Camera Film Critic Jeanine Fritz at