With a wrestler known as the Rock turning hockey player, several cute kids, Julie Andrews as Spenser's Fairie Queen come to 21st-century life and a screenplay by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, who mine the same slag pile for more repetitive nonsense in every one of their many movies, what arrives in "Tooth Fairy" is exactly what one might expect -- a dull, turgid, totally predictable comedy of the type to give "family entertainment" a bad name.
Dwayne Johnson goes from ring to rink as a minor-league hockey enforcer named Derek who slams opponents into the boards, separating them from their teeth while a pair of ninnies in the broadcast booth scream orgasmically at the violence.
Away from the ice, he is busily courting Carly (Ashley Judd), who is a mother of two, a pre-adolescent boy (Chase Ellison) who plays guitar and hates Derek, and a younger girl (Destiny Grace Whitlock) who likes the pumped-up athlete, who looks as if he just stepped out of a tanning booth.
And then Derek makes a disparaging remark about tooth fairies, and suddenly he is one, complete with wings and tutu, taking orders from Andrews and Stephen Merchant, both of whom have English accents (they're English, but still. . . .). The comedy, both verbal and physical, and situations are tired and familiar and the movie drags on like an entire year of second-rate sit-coms.
Opens today at multiple theaters
-Joe
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