I put a spell on you!

Supernatural romance dramas have taken the world by storm in the past decade … a dark, thundery and often disastrous storm.

Beautiful Creatures is no different, it pretty much targets all the Twilight fans out there. Realising this from the trailers, I went in with the mindset of a teenager.

Surprisingly, I actually laughed throughout.  Unfortunately this movie is a predictable, cheesy, unconvincing and melodramatic experience but that’s exactly what it says on the tin, so I had fun with it.

Replacing vampires with witches was about the only difference. The story is also part one of four installments in the Caster Chronicles, a young adult book series from co-authors Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl about witches known as ‘casters’ locked in a struggle between light and dark, good and bad.

Ethan Wate (Alden Ehrenreich), is a high school student in a small town in South Carolina. When a new mysterious and withdrawn girl, Lena Duchannes (Alice Englert), joins his school he immediately becomes obsessed with her. Yes, immediately, it’s kind of creepy actually.

The audience later comes to find out that Lena is in fact a ‘caster’ and on her 16th birthday she will be claimed as a force for the light or the dark side.

Lena lives with her uncle, Macon Ravenwood (Irons), who is not the most liked person in the community. But Macon is trying to push Lena towards the light side by keeping her away from all evil as well as her mother, Sarafine (Thompson) who comes to town to tempt Lena with the power she can obtain by being on the dark side.

As her birthday draws closer, Ethan finds out about Lena’s destiny and he decides to help her and, although Macon disapproves of him, it is his only way to keep her from turning nasty.

That’s pretty much it. The story is more of a snooze-fest than it sounds, but it’s the goofiness of Ehrenreich that made the very slow plot bearable. He almost seems intoxicated throughout, smirking and giggling even in the most intense situations, making it difficult not to laugh with him … not to mention his corny dialogue is a big joke too.

However, the on-screen chemistry between him and Englert failed miserably. I didn’t believe their ‘connection’ although it is said that their stars were ‘aligned’.

Englert delivers a good performance, nothing Oscar-worthy, but she was withdrawn, moody and confused, helping the audience understand the difficulty it must take for a 15-year-old to choose between good and evil… pretty much like Kirsten Stewart from Twilight, minus the red eyes.

I was shocked to see Oscar-winning Thompson and Irons in the film, I guess film roles aren’t coming in like they used to.

Having said this, Thompson was the most convincing as an evil, supernatural entity, but nothing surprising there.

Irons, however, overacted many of his scenes and came off as unlikeable, which is definitely not the intention of the director.

The film does nothing new, runs at least 40-minutes over, has a dull love story and a cheesy script … but the goofy performances are where the real ‘magic’ lies.