by Rob Reiner, 1987.
Starring: Billy Crystal, Cary Elwes, Peter Falk, Christopher Guest, Carol Kane, Mandy Patinkin, Chris Sarandon, Fred Savage, Wallace Shawn, Robin Wright, and Andre the Giant.
Rating: 6.5/10, 6/10.
Don’t tell anyone I said this, but I didn’t love this movie. I liked it, sure. Parts of it were brilliant, most of it was very funny. But the movie as a whole...good, not great.
Maybe it’s because I didn’t grow up with it the way most of the people who are obsessed with it did. I saw it once when I was little, and I just saw it for the second time. The girl I watched it with had every line memorised.
So, plot. Buttercup (Robin Wright...not Robin Wright Penn yet) is a beautiful woman who falls in love with her farm boy, Westley (Elwes). Alack and alas, he is sent off (for some reason, I can’t remember why) and apparently killed by a pirate. Though she will never love anyone else and she promised to wait for him, Buttercup is forced to marry the evil Prince Humperdinck (Sarandon). Before she can be married, she is kidnapped by a bunch of very, very funny villains (Patinkin, Andre the Giant, and Shawn) who have their own complicated motivations. She is rescued, reunited with the not-dead Westley, some villains turn out to be not so villainous, the king blinks a lot, and all sorts of other things happen that cause happily ever after type things to happen by the end.
I have to give this movie mad props for being one of the only times that Billy Crystal has actually made me laugh. Not that I would have known it was him if I hadn’t been told so, he and Carol Kane are both covered in so much makeup they could really have been anyone.
The more I think about it, the less certain I get about what, exactly, it was that kept me from loving The Princess Bride. Maybe it’s just that it’s been so built up as the best movie ever! by nearly everyone I know for most of my life, that really nothing could live up to it. I do recommend it, just not as strongly as others might.