DVD Review: StarStruck

StarStruck. 90 mins. Rated G. Directed by Michael Grossman. Written by Barbara Johns and Annie DeYoung.

There’s a worthwhile message hiding in this ‘musical’ fairytale. It’s about how, in our celebrity-obsessed world, meaningful connections between people can happen in the most unlikely of circumstances. The attendant power of celebrity was witnessed recently when YouTube’s teen idol Justin Bieber arrived in Australia. Everywhere he went, he created pandemonium – proving that if adoring teenage girls want to get close to their young heartthrobs, nothing but significant police intervention can stop them.

Christopher Wilde (Sterling Knight) is a young pop star on the brink of mega movie stardom. He has the perfect ‘A-list’ girlfriend and thousands of devoted fans clamouring to know the details of his every move. When he is photographed during an altercation with the notorious Hollywood paparazzi outside a Los Angeles nightclub, his agent warns him that unless he can maintain a squeaky-clean image, his movie career will go nowhere.

In the meantime, one of his most obsessed fans Sara (Maggie Castle) and her younger sister Jessica (Danielle Campbell) travel to LA with their parents to visit relatives. Sara is determined to use the opportunity to meet her idol, whereas the straight-shooting Jessica cannot understand what all the fuss is about. When Jessica and Christopher accidentally meet outside a nightclub, the young heartthrob is forced to confront the concept that genuine feelings are quite different from the manufactured ones forced on him by the circumstances of his career.

You would think it would have been relatively uncomplicated for Disney to produce an engaging and possibly even thoughtful film starring two young leads whose characters have very different views about what’s important in the world. After all, it’s one of the things they do best. Instead, with the help of a collection of banal and over-produced songs, StarStruck struggles to maintain our interest before it collapses under the weight of a script so impossibly trite it becomes difficult to believe you’re actually listening to it. And while Knight and Campbell have a certain surface appeal, they both lack the necessary depth of acting ability that a film focussed almost exclusively on their complicated young love affair demands.

The result, with the exception of a cute mud-bath sequence in the middle of nowhere, is a very ordinary little made-for-television movie that fails to deliver on its promise. The film’s target audience – young girls with enquiring minds, wild imaginations, dreams and aspirations about what it is possible to achieve with their lives – deserve a great deal more than this DVD equivalent of junk food.

This review was commissioned by the Geraldton Newspapers Group and was published in the print edition of the Geraldton Guardian.