Nancy Drew
***
Emma Roberts, Max Thieriot, Rachael Leigh Cook, Tate Donovan, Laura Elena Harring
Directed by Andrew Fleming
Rated PG
Opens Friday
It’s sadly plausible that director Fleming (Dick, The Craft) and co-writer Tiffany Paulsen would update Carolyn Keene’s original Nancy Drew (created in 1930) and dumb her down for a younger audience with a shorter attention span. But even though they have given her a cell phone and other digital crime-solving devices, they have opted to keep a good head on Nancy’s shoulders. She remains unaffected and unfazed by modern contrivances, able to see through them as if using an X-ray magnifying glass.
Crafty Nancy (Roberts) enters the picture fully formed (no prologue necessary). She solves a crime, negotiates with the robbers and scales down the side of a building before leaving her hometown of River Heights for Los Angeles, where her lawyer father (Donovan) has picked up some temporary work. He makes her promise not to sleuth in the big city, but Nancy has already found a mystery in their rented house. Decades earlier, a movie star (Harring) disappeared, then turned up murdered. Nancy tries to figure out whodunit and why.
Fleming creates a clever, snappy, self-aware picture in which Nancy thrives. She’s bubbly and old-fashioned, but she serves as the unflappable center to a screwball universe. When she visits a movie set looking for clues, she interrupts a take by correcting a continuity error. The movie star (I’ll leave the identity as a surprise) likes her spunk and asks her if she’d like to take over as director.
Nancy Drew is filled with such nifty, often visually astute moments, but sadly, Fleming doesn’t fully trust his own plan. He dilutes the mix with bits of flabby, kid-friendly slapstick. A comical kid sidekick (Josh Flitter) turns up for no reason, and the story stops dead for certain scenes (like a birthday party) and some relationship issues between Nancy and her pal Ned Nickerson (Thieriot). The film goes especially lumpy toward the end, including an out-of-place, touchy-feely coda in which the story’s victim (Cook) puts her new windfall to good use. Nancy herself surely would have sniffed out and solved these inconsistencies, and such competence makes her movie worth investigating.