Emma Roberts, Joanna Levesque, Sara Paxton

Directed by Elizabeth Allen

Rated PG

Considering that I am not an eight-year-old girl, I knew going in that I wasn’t exactly in the target audience for Aquamarine. Yet I walked into the theatre hoping to be pleasantly surprised by the saga of a mermaid’s (Paxton) search for love and the two girls (Roberts and Levesque) who help her.

Unfortunately, with the exception of Bruce Spence of The Road Warrior fame turning up in a small role, surprises were few and far between. After about ten minutes, I began making my clich’ checklist.

Quirky grandparents: check.

Villainous gang of rich bitch girls: check.

Generic cover song (in this case, of Blondie’s ’One Way or Another’) by young artist on soundtrack: check.

Dialogue including the line ’You’re not like other girls around here’: check.

Trying on clothes montage: check.

I’m not going to bore you with anymore of this; you get the idea. To be fair, it is nice to see a film that is actually appropriate for its target audience. The story has a sweetness and innocence missing from much of today’s ’family entertainment.’ It also, thankfully, doesn’t contain an excess of pop culture references.

But it doesn’t stimulate the imagination either. It plays out like a feature-length sitcom. At 109 minutes, it feels way too long. The filmmakers felt it necessary to give everyone an obstacle to overcome, yet didn’t take the time to properly develop any of them.

The three leads are all charming, but they aren’t given much to work with.

For a ’tween’ comedy you could do much worse. Still, a film supposedly about individuality shouldn’t play like the cinematic equivalent of a Barbie Happy Meal.