On The Couch 2011 #24: Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement

The look on Anne Hathaway’s face in the poster for Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement isn’t a look of surprise about having to marry to obtain the throne, it’s a look directed at the movie’s viewer, asking “Are you sure you want to watch this? I’ve been in much better movies.” Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement should be shown in the classrooms of film schools around the country so that the future writers and directors of tomorrow can learn what to avoid when crafting their future projects. The jokes in the movie are the perfect storm of corny, dumb and over-explained.

I get that I’m not in the target audience for Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement, but that doesn’t make it any less a terrible movie. There are plenty of movies that are aimed at children that can be enjoyed by adults, some even with Princess in their names (The Princess Bride, anyone?) so clearly it can be done. I wasn’t expecting to particularly like Princess Diaries 2, but I also wasn’t expecting to hate it this much either.

What’s remarkable about Princess Diaries 2 is the number of high quality actors it took to help make such a bad movie. Anne Hathaway, Julie Andrews, Hector Elizondo, John Rhys Davies and a very big-haired Chris Pine all share this stinker on their resume.

Trim that bush, Chris Pine!

Without a doubt, the best part of Princess Diaries 2 is Director Garry Marshall explaining during the deleted scenes of why he really liked a scene that wasn’t good enough to make it into this movie that is entirely made of scenes that aren’t good enough to make it into a movie.

Stanley Tucci is not in Princess Diaries 2, despite me thinking he was. But even The Tooch couldn’t make this a good movie. A better movie? Definitely. A good movie? Even The Tooch has his limits.

See this movie if you want to learn how not to write. Or if you have the Rifftrax. Or if you think I’m joking about how bad it is.

The only thing preventing me from ranking this lower than Wedding Daze on the list of movies I’ve seen this year is that Princess Diaries 2 had a song by Julie Andrews in it, her first since her throat surgery in 1997. Though the follow-up duet with Raven-Symone has me second guessing whether or not Wedding Daze was actually the worse movie.