Hannah Montana – Family Fun Movie
By Daily News Editor
Published: April 17, 2009
Miley Cyrus is smart. Oh, don’t have a cow.
The whole Hannah Montana alter ego thing is clever, as it allows Cyrus to lay all the negative things about fame at the feet of a fictitious character. That leaves the ‘real’ Miley to stay true blue in the eyes of her fans.
With Hannah Montana: The Movie, Cyrus is even smarter, using the blonde wig and that pretend pop star to announce her graduation into grown up acting life. The movie is a forgettable confection involving family, farming and first kisses, but Cyrus comes out of the cow pasture smelling like a rose.
Hannah Montana: The Movie lets Cyrus flirt briefly with some of the pitfalls of being a celebrity teen — big ego, brattiness, entitlement, disloyalty — and then shows her coming to her senses and returning to her good Miley self. It’s as if her handlers anticipated all the criticisms that might be coming her way, and then cut them off in one fell story swoop.
The film begins with Cyrus getting too far into the life of Hannah. She’s flooded with free goodies because she’s a star, she has a knock-down fight with Tyra Banks over a pair of designer shoes and she chooses the New York music awards over Grandma’s birthday party in Crowley Corners.
When she disappoints her best friend (Emily Osment) on her Sweet 16 birthday, dad (Billy Ray Cyrus) decides to step in. Against her will, Cyrus ends up in Tennessee at Grandma’s party instead of in New York at the awards show.
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“Think of it as a Hannah detox,” says dad — choosing his words carefully — as he insists that Cyrus get back to the land and her roots.
She’s furious at first, but a cute local cowboy named Travis (Lucas Till) makes being back in hicksville bearable.
Besides falling for the cowboy, Cyrus gets to sweetly foil a tabloid reporter who’s sniffing around for mean things to write about Hannah. And she gets to defend Crawley Corners from a big, bad developer (Barry Bostwick).
He wants to destroy the land to put up a big ol’ shopping mall. The locals hope to raise enough money to buy the land back, but it won’t be easy. Of course, if that pop star Hannah Montana were to magically turn up in town and give a concert, that would change everything …
Young fans of Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana will absolutely love this movie, and non-fans will concede that Cyrus can (a) sing and (b) handle comedy quite nicely. There are portions of the movie that are killingly over-long (Cyrus attempting to be both Hannah and Miley in one night, and running back and forth between two different dinners, for example) but for the most part, the movie is far better than anyone might have reason to expect.
Above all, there’s a good-natured spirit about the story that’s tough to resist.
For her part, Cyrus is energetic and appealing on the big screen, and she comes across as singularly unimpressed with herself.
Let’s hope it lasts
Tagged with: hannah montana, movie
