Hannah Montana – The Movie (2009/Disney Blu-ray w/DVD)
Picture:
B-/C+ Sound: B/B- Extras: D Film: D
Miley
Cyrus is back as Hannah Montana and Hannah Montana is back as Miley Stewart
and… geeez. They’re all back in the
awful Hannah Montana – The Movie, a 2009
cinematic horror from Director Peter Chelsom, who’s last film was the
underrated Shall We Dance? (2004,
reviewed elsewhere on this site) and also gave us the über-disaster Town & Country (2001). Imagine the latter as a bad, bad backstage
musical and you begin to see this is easily distinguished as one of the worst
films of the year in a massive ocean of them.
Her life
is so great, she is almost a split-personality, so will she be a city gal or
country gal? With Eva Gabor nowhere to
be found for advice, she can turn to Billy Ray Cyrus (looking as bored as
clinically depressed; what is with that flat hair?) and even Vanessa Williams
cannot make this work. The whole
franchise is beyond tired and to say this is for fans only is an understatement. The whole script (what there is of it) is
made to butter up the egos of naïve female fans. Then the film concludes with a dance lesson
that make the Macarena look like Twyla Tharp.
The 1080p
1.85 X 1 digital High Definition image is weaker than it should be, but has a
generic look to match the rest of this disaster. With its motion blur and bad editing, it
looks like a bad HD shoot, though it is said to be shot in 35mm film, it is not
good. The anamorphically enhanced DVD
included as a bonus is worse. Then comes
the sound, here in a shockingly bad and wasteful DTS-HD 7.1 Master Audio (MA)
uncompressed mix that is not even great when we get music. The Dolby Digital 5.1 mixes on both format
versions is even weaker, but it is obvious that the makers were barely thinking
5.1 let alone 7.1 and she is a meager singer to begin with. Dialogue recording is so-so too.
Extras
include Digital Copy for PC and PC portable devices, Blu-ray exclusive BD Live
dance featurette and dance-along, bloopers (hard to tell from the final
footage), Deleted Scenes (ditto), seven Music Videos (noooooooooo!), two featurettes
and (oh no!) audio commentary by Director Chelsom. This from a man who just made another film
that goes from ‘town’ to ‘country’.
- Nicholas Sheffo
