What A Girl Wants: Critic Reviews

A likable throwaway.

It's no longer the children who must learn to grow up, but the adults -- exemplified by Mr. Firth's character as he slips into a pair of leather pants and practices his air-guitar moves -- who are required to grow down.

Girls undoubtedly will want to see it, but What a Girl Wants feels a bit like a reheated version of The Princess Diaries.

Uninspired and insipid all the way.

It's not that What a Girl Wants is dreadful; it's merely slapdash, wildly inconsistent in tone and style, and mind-numbingly predictable in character and plot.

A sanitized adventure for the Mary Kate-and-Ashley set.

Though predictable and often preposterous, this warm and funny wish-fulfilling fantasy is a richly rewarding ride.

The story is one of those laboratory concoctions in which you can tell the conclusion from the opening scene.

The movie asks the timeless question: Can a little girl from America find love and happiness as the daughter of a wealthy and titled English lord? If you are a fan of Bynes, you will probably enjoy finding out the answer for yourself. If not, not.

What a girl wants, according to screenwriters Jenny Bicks and Elizabeth Chandler, is a father. What a girl needs, however, are better filmmakers.

Clueless without a clue.

Predominantly fluffy and loveably goofy, mostly due to the presence of Bynes, who's definitely a star in the making.

It's fantasy time for the instant gratification generation.

Director Dennie Gordon is no Vincent Minnelli, to put it mildly, and the no-cliche- left-unturned screenplay by a platoon of screenwriters misses few opportunities to pander to its target audience of pre-adolescent girls.

The new film is an excellent choice for American parents who want their children to grow up infatuated with British royalty.

What A Girl Wants doesn't satisfy.

Is What a Girl Wants what anybody wants? Not really.

Forget 'Halloween.' Forget 'The Shining.' Forget 'The Exorcist' and 'The Ring.' The movie to truly horrify a grown man is 'What a Girl Wants,' a motion picture that only a female (preferably between the ages of 8 and 16) could love.

Its makers have been so busy running around trying to push all the preprogrammed buttons that the tender father-daughter theme at the picture's core seldom feels like anything more than another opportunity to alter the frantically changing pace.

It's slick girlie stuff, but the cast makes it go down easy.

Compared with this, the similar Princess Diaries is a tough-minded work of realism, yet on its own narrow terms What a Girl Wants works well enough.

Overly cute, but great for its intended audience.