Entertainment

STINKHEART

A flea market of fairy tales and hocus-pocus, “Inkheart” makes as much sense as an inkblot.

Brendan Fraser plays Mo, a dad who, when reading a story to his baby daughter, discovers that he is a “Silvertongue” – characters he reads about come to life. Also, someone from real life disappears into the book he’s reading, so he loses his wife.

Twelve years later, Mo’s now-adolescent daughter Meggie (Eliza Hope Bennett) has, for unknown reasons, a prim British accent: “I don’t undahstand ah-tall!” The two of them roam the world looking in used bookstores (these days they’re in the Alps) for a copy of the rare book “Inkheart,” which Mo was reading when his wife disappeared. A character from the book (Paul Bettany) who can shoot fire from his palms (not a terribly useful gift, unless it’s a world without matches) trails after Mo and Meggie whining like a sullen teen demanding to be “read back” into the book where his ladylove awaits – she’s Jennifer Connelly, in an unbilled cameo.

Every 5-year-old will be wondering why Mo’s search doesn’t begin and end with Amazon.com, but that isn’t the silliest part of the movie. Meggie is also a Silvertongue, a gift she discovers while visiting her batty great-aunt (Helen Mirren). Yet no one on-screen is curious about how far this Silvertongue gift goes. It goes pretty far, far enough to end the movie in an instant.

Any words a Silvertongue reads, even words they have just scribbled on their arms a second ago, can work magic, so either father or daughter could just dream up the story twist they want and make it real. Actually, the movie should be over before it starts, since both father and daughter would have known this by the time the girl’s mom vanished.

Meggie and especially Mo are so bland that the movie expends lots of time on the troubled fire-juggler, Dustfinger, who frets about whether he is a good guy or a bad guy.

Director Iain Softley could have handled him with something like the whimsy of the Jasper Fforde “Thursday Next” novels – witty romps through the classics. Instead Dustfinger is a mope, and the rules of the game are never clear. At times he is limited by the way he is written. Other times he seems to have free will. So which is it?

The same rules problem goes for the Silvertongues. It should be fun to figure out the system with them as they go, but instead random chance seems to determine which character steps in or out of a story they read.

To make things extra painful, there is much cutting to nonfunny comic-relief characters whose idea of banter is lines like, “If you don’t stop shaking, I’m gonna stick you with a pin.” There’s a ferret, an assortment of henchmen, Jim Broadbent as the nerdy author of “Inkheart” (“I’m sorry,” he says, “but I’m afraid all of the henchmen blend into one – even to me.” Exactly.) and a boy from the “Arabian Nights” who speaks a Manuel-on-“Fawlty Towers” pidgin while fumbling with unfamiliar modern items.

Every so often Softley whips up a special-effects extravaganza such as a cyclone Mo reads into reality from “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” and a climax involving a giant assembled out of smoky clouds who looks like a charcoal sketch of the Mummy. Flying monkeys, a minotaur and the gravestone of Ebenezer Scrooge drop in and out like union workers who punch their time cards and then quit for the day.

At one point, the crabby Mirren figure bursts dramatically into the action on a unicorn, although the drama is partially limited by the fact that she has nothing to do when she gets there. A sign on her character’s house that reads, “Don’t even think of wasting my time” would have been better placed on her agent’s door.

kyle.Smith@nypost.com