Nancy Drew

Director: Andrew Fleming
Cast: Emma Roberts, Josh Flitter, Max Thieriot

In Nancy Drew, the titular girl sleuth, a literary role model and crush object for generations of young readers, is decked out with air quotes and the full complement of knowing pop-culture accessories. At one point in the film a Southern California real estate agent appraises Nancy’s penny-loafer-and-knee-socks look and says, “With a little tweaking, you could be adorable.” Later a semi-reformed Mean Girl from Nancy’s school notes that Nancy’s retro appearance has become a fashion sensation called “the new sincerity”.

As far as I’m concerned, the old sincerity worked just fine, and too much tweaking has been done with the intention of bringing the girl sleuth up to date. The disappointment of Nancy Drew, which was directed by Andrew Fleming and written by Fleming and Tiffany Paulsen, is that it trusts neither its heroine nor its audience enough to approach its material with the confidence and conviction that Carolyn Keene, the pseudonymous author of the Nancy Drew books, brought to the franchise.

The movie turns Nancy, played with more pluck than brilliance by Emma Roberts, into an uptight goody-two-shoes, a prig who lectures her school principal on matters of policy and who won’t exceed the speed limit in the middle of a car chase.

Worse, Nancy Drew corrupts the clean, functional, grown-up style of the books with the kind of cute, pseudo-smart self-consciousness that has sadly become the default setting for contemporary juvenile popular culture produced by insecure, immature adults.

Nancy and her father (Tate Donovan) move from River Heights, a hackneyed Hollywood image of an American small town, to an equally hackneyed Hollywood image of, um, Hollywood. There, the girls are vapid mini-fashionistas who wrinkle their noses at Nancy’s heartland earnestness and conspire to steal her cupcakes at lunch. Some people have tattoos. Back home there was a German housekeeper in a starched uniform, a population that dresses from the 1958 L. L. Bean catalogue and a clean-cut boy named Ned (Max Thieriot), who hung around waiting for Nancy to notice he’s madly in love with her.

In time Ned shows up in Los Angeles, where he must compete for Nancy’s attention with Corky (Josh Flitter), kid brother to one of the Mean Girls and perhaps the most annoying sidekick character in a movie since Robin Williams’s last cartoon voice-over.

Corky’s wisecracking distracts from what should be the movie’s main concern, namely the solving of a mystery. The great appeal of the Nancy Drew books (the first was published in 1930), as of any mystery-novel series, lies not in the static, predictable characters but in the intricate, well-carpentered plots.

What keeps the readers’ eyes on the page is the chance to look over the detective’s shoulder as she puzzles over clues, and to feel the tingle of apprehension when her sleuthing begins to get her in trouble.

The greatest failure of Nancy Drew is that it denies viewers these pleasures, sacrificing the sturdy mechanics of a decent thriller in order to pursue tired jokes and second-hand atmospherics.

At first the set-up seems promising. Nancy and her dad move into a crumbling bungalow once owned by a movie star whose death 25 years earlier has never been explained. Her fate gives the movie some intriguing intimations of Hollywood kiddie-noir.

But this is not a child’s-portion Chinatown, or even a PG Black Dahlia. Instead the mystery has all the suspense and intrigue of a less-than-groovy episode of Scooby-Doo.

I wish it were otherwise. And maybe, if this movie spawns sequels, it will be. Roberts is certainly energetic and likeable, and the character might regain her wide and durable appeal in spite of the obnoxious way she is written here.

But as it is, Nancy Drew stands as an example of how to take a foolproof, time-tested formula — a young detective using smarts and determination to solve a case — and mess it up with superficial cleverness and pandering hackwork. How this happened is hardly a mystery; botched adaptations are as common as BlackBerries in Hollywood. But it is nonetheless something of a crime.