You’ve seen this movie before. The first half was “Coming to America.” The second half was “Mona Lisa Smile.”
It’s even worse this time.
Here, the oddly featured but still cute Julia Stiles is Paige Morgan, a smart, ambitious escapee from a family dairy farm who’s finishing up a pre-med degree at the University of Wisconsin.
As in “Smile,” Miss Stiles is staving off marriage. In this case, of course, the ones getting hitched aren’t 1950s New England elites but present-day Midwestern hayseeds. Unlike them, Paige has dreams of being an international compassion medic for Doctors Without Borders.
Martha Coolidge’s “The Prince & Me” places a by-the-numbers fairy-tale contrivance in her way.
The skinny, not particularly handsome Luke Mably plays Edvard, a feckless wastrel of a Danish prince — a Hamlet without the anxiety issues who happens to speak in a rich English accent.
Almost but not quite as arbitrarily as Eddie Murphy’s Prince Akeem in “America,” Edvard picks an out-of-the-way locale for his trip to the States.
Akeem chose Queens, New York, thinking literally that he’d find a suitable queen there. Edvard chooses Wisconsin, thinking it’ll be his personal installment of a “Girls Gone Wild” video.
“The Prince” works well enough while in Wisconsin. Edvard, or “Eddie,” as he wishes to be called in America, and his servant, Soren (Ben Miller, doing a straight-man version of the role Arsenio Hall filled in “America”), are stuck with an amusing bozo roommate who’s funny in his handful of throwaway scenes.
Eddie and Paige meet each other at the campus deli and later in chemistry class. It doesn’t go well at first, mostly because the former is an imperious pig, and also because, well, what else would we do for the next 90 minutes?
Oh, but then things improve. She helps him with laundry. He helps her with Shakespeare.
Paige invites Eddie back to the farm for Thanksgiving, but strictly on a platonic basis. Some all-American fun involving a tractor race ensues and, finally, Paige gives in to Eddie, who by now has, of course, become a complete gentleman.
It’s at this point that “The Prince” doesn’t know what to do with itself. So it ends up in Copenhagen, where it becomes a showy montage of palaces and protocol.
When every romantic-teen-comedy cliche is exhausted, it seems, the only thing left to do is go for costume melodrama. “The Prince & Me” doesn’t survive the transplant.
*1/2
TITLE: “The Prince & Me”
RATING: PG (Mild sexuality; brief profanity)
CREDITS: Directed by Martha Coolidge. Produced by Mark Amin. Story by Mr. Amin and Katherine Fugate. Screenplay by Jack Amiel, Michael Begler and Miss Fugate. Cinematography by Alex Nepomniaschy.
RUNNING TIME: 103 minutes
WEB SITE: www.princeandme.com
MAXIMUM RATING: FOUR STARS
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