You’ve got to admire Matthew Vaughn. Not many directors would have walked away from X3 to take a punt on Neil Gaiman’s Stardust, even if it is the kind of whimsical fantasy that’s practically begging to be sprinkled with some movie magic.
Charlie Cox plays Tristan, a young Englishman in the backwater village of Wall, the border between the real world and the magical realm of Stormhold. Here, the dying king sets his sons a quest to decide who should succeed him, one that will pit them against a sisterhood of witches led by Michelle Pfeiffer, a band of flying pirates captained by Robert De Niro and young Tristan himself, who has his own quest to fulfil to win the heart of local beauty Sienna Miller. The key to all their adventures is a star, or, actually, is Star (Claire Danes) who has fallen to earth, thus kick-starting a proper kerfuffle.
You’ll desperately want to believe in Stardust. You’ll want to applaud its ambition and admire its old-fashioned emphasis on story and character. You’ll want to be swept up by its action and swept away by its romance.
You will, however, do none of these things, and no matter how much you admire the man, the blame for that is to be laid squarely at the door of Matthew Vaughn.
The first half-hour of Stardust is a catastrophe of poor story-telling that practically sinks the entire film. Now, obviously, you need to suspend your disbelief when dealing with parallel universes, wise-cracking ghosts and the unstoppable career of Ricky Gervais, but Stardust does nothing to earn its audience’s trust. In fact, there are such alarming gaps in the film’s internal logic that it’s simply unreasonable to expect the audience not to ask questions.
For instance, why, in the age of global expansion, has Britain failed to notice a magical realm on its doorstep? Or did they mistake it for Wales? Why did Tristan’s mum allow his dad to hop over the wall, knock her up and bugger off as if he’s on some kind of fantastical stag do? Why are the flying pirates bottling lightning? Why…? Why…? Why…? You get the picture.
Moreover, on the odd occasion when Stardust does establish some rules – like, ‘Whenever Michelle Pfeiffer uses her powers, lo, she will age and this will be the occasion for hilarious eye-rolling and, ‘Man, I’m so old’ gags’ – it then feels free to turn its back on those rules whenever they start to hinder the dramatic potential of the plot.
After an hour or so being pistol-whipped into submission, you’ll start to admire, with a kind of addled stupefaction, the film’s bold, Gilliam-esque visuals and the easy, affectionate chemistry between Charlie Cox and Claire Danes that hints at what might have been.
Then Robert De Niro turns up in drag for a musical number and you realise that you’re watching Matthew Vaughn base jump off the A List without a parachute, and you don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
