Routinely exploited by her wicked stepmother, the downtrodden Sam Martin is excited about the prospect of meeting her Internet beau at the school's Halloween dance.
If you killed off Lizzie McGuire's entire family and sent her to live with an evil stepmother and two stepsisters in the Valley, you'd have the basic setup for A Cinderella Story, the banal, contemporary update of the popular fairy tale that stars Hilary Duff, best known as the Disney Channel poster girl.
It's not such a grisly stretch when you consider that Cinderella director Mark Rosman is responsible for the 1983 horror flick and cult favorite House on Sorority Row. More recently, however, Rosman has worked with Duff on Lizzie McGuire and directed a handful of other Disney Channel kidcoms as well as accumulating a fair number of cable feature credits. Unfortunately...
Cinderella Story
This is a light hearted romantic comedy which has some really nice scenes it won't be everyones cup of tea but I liked it as I like Cinderella/fairy stories.
Cinderella Story, A
After bowling over adolescent girls in the Freaky Friday remake, Chad Michael Murray reinforces his pin-up status with another romantic role. In a high-school-set reworking of the Cinderella fairy tale, Murray's modern-day Prince Charming may do his wooing via cyberspace but he still manages to live up to the archetype. Little wonder, then, that orphaned student Hilary Duff is smitten by the initially anonymous, online sweet-talker, who's a dreamy diversion from the cruel demands of her self-obsessed stepmother (Jennifer Coolidge) and spiteful stepsisters. Visually Duff and Murray make a cute couple, even if neither are particularly charismatic, and their overall enthusi...
Cinderella Story, A
A more original story might have added a little vitality to this tired and saccharine confection for dim-witted lovers.
