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Teen sleuth Nancy Drew (Emma Roberts) has saved the quaint little town of River Heights from crooks and bad guys time and time again. But when her dad (Tate Donovan) takes on a temporary job in Los Angeles, he begs her to give up sleuthing for a while—and just be a normal teenager. What he doesn’t know, though, is that Nancy has already lined up a new mystery in L.A.
For a while, she tries to fit in at her new school, but Roberts’s old-fashioned, prim-and-proper Nancy fits in about as much as Beaver Cleaver would fit into present-day Brooklyn. So she gets back to the mystery at hand. The house they’ve rented once belonged to Dehlia Draycott (Laura Elena Harring), an actress who, in the early ‘80s, disappeared for five months. When she reappeared, Dehlia planned her triumphant return to Hollywood—but, instead, she wound up dead in her pool. It’s a famous Hollywood mystery, and Nancy intends to solve it—with the help of her new friend Corky (Josh Flitter), and Ned (Max Thieriot), her friend from River Heights.
I’ve got a mystery for Nancy Drew to solve. I call it The Mystery of the Missing Movie. Because despite the fact that this is the first time we’ve seen Roberts as the girl detective, Nancy Drew feels like a sequel. Somewhere out there, there’s a script for a relatively cute kids’ movie about an old-fashioned teenage girl solving mysteries in a small, old-fashioned town. But director Andrew Fleming decided to skip right over the original movie and go straight to the bad, painfully awkward sequel (think Pirates of the Caribbean 4, in which Jack Sparrow beaches the Black Pearl and heads to Vegas). We get only about ten minutes in River Heights (a town that feels like it came right out of an old Andy Griffith Show rerun) before dragging Nancy off to a place where she doesn’t belong: the twenty-first century.
While some movies do modern-yet-classic well, Nancy Drew isn’t one of them. I’m sure Fleming thought it would be cute, taking an old-fashioned character and putting her in modern-day LA. And, perhaps, if Nancy had been just a normal small-town girl who’s transplanted in LA, it would have worked. Or perhaps, if this had been a time-travel movie, it would have worked. But, instead, Nancy seems to have been taken straight out of 1958. She travels by train. She wears penny loafers and clothes she makes from her mother’s old patterns. She prefers vinyl over CDs (and not because she’s hip and alternative). She lectures her principal on the importance of CPR classes and the dangers of lead paint. Instead of quirky and lovable, she’s prissy and annoying—like the stereotypical goody-two-shoes hall monitor.
Fleming also tries to make the mystery feel like something straight out of glamorous old Hollywood. The Drews live in an old, run-down house, and Dehlia Draycott is seen only in period pieces, making her look like an actress from the ‘30s. But Draycott was supposedly at the height of her career when she died in 1981, making her more Saturday Night Fever than Gone with the Wind. Maybe I’m just picking apart the details here, but none of them come together—and it makes the whole movie feel disjointed.
So, in the end, you get an annoying character, living in the wrong century, trying to solve one of glamorous 1980s Hollywood’s most popular unsolved mysteries—which turns out to be ridiculously obvious. And, meanwhile, it’s often totally cliché and even, at times, just plain dull.
If your pre-teen daughter is a big Emma Roberts fan, she’ll probably enjoy it just because Emma Roberts is in it. But save yourself the agony and boredom—just drop her off at the theater with her friends and pick her up when it’s over.
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