| Movie DescriptionThe story begins with Mortimer "Mo" Folchart (Brendan Fraser) and his wife Resa (Sienna Guillory) reading a bedtime story Little Red Riding Hood to their infant daughter Meggie. As Mo reads the story, a red velvet hood appears, unbeknownst to the family as a narrator explains that people known as "Silver Tongues" are born with the gift that whenever they read a story aloud, their elements come into reality, and that some are completely unaware of their gifts.
Flash forward 12 years into the future, Mo and Meggie (Eliza Bennett) are trolling the European countrysides for a book for which Mo has been looking for years. He has come to learn of his gifts, and nine years prior, Resa had vanished, much to the chagrin of her extended family. Hearing the calling of books from a bookstore one day, Mo, a reputed book repairer, leaves Meggie outside and ventures inside after being offered to browse the shelves. He finds the book "Inkheart" in the stock and is overwhelmed with a mixture of fear and joy.
At the same time, Dustfinger (Paul Bettany), a character from Inkheart appears and attempts to persuade Mo to read him back into the book. Mo refuses to do so and hastily escapes with Meggie and travels to Italy to pay a visit to Meggie's great aunt Elinor Loredan (Helen Mirren). Elinor accuses Resa of running off, which upsets Meggie, but the two make amends when expressing their mutual passion for valuable books, and Elinor lets Meggie stay in her library to read. Dustfinger appears again, but this time having informed the book's villain Capricorn (Andy Serkis) and bringing his minion Basta (Jamie Foreman) to capture Mo and his family and take back the book, in the meantime destroying Elinor's valuable collection of books.
The trio are taken to Capricorn's castle, and imprisoned in the stables, which house various creatures from storybooks, such as the ticking Crocodile from Peter Pan, flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz, and the title character of The Hound of the Baskervilles as well as the minotaur from the poem of Theseus and unicorn. Mo explains to Meggie and Elinor about his gift, he states that when he reads a person out of the book, either intentionally or unintentionally, someone from the real world is sent into it, hence the disappearance of his wife, and from the day of her disappearance nine years prior, he had not read to Meggie from any story. They are abruptly taken to meet with Capricorn, and meet his current reader Darius (John Thomson), whose perpetual stutter had caused all of those he had read out of the book to only come halfway out of the story, with various deformities and the words of the stories written on their faces. Capricorn breaks his promise to Dustfinger to have him read back into the book, and throws it onto the fire, burning it. In his despair, Dustfinger leaves the group and runs to the kitchen, where he learns that one of the servant girls, a trusted friend of his who is constantly attempting to escape, is in fact Mo's lost wife Resa, whose halfway transition from the book she was trapped in has left her without a voice. He gives her the access to escape and departs. |
