Very few people would expect ""The Tooth Fairy"" to be a great movie. Still, Dwayne ""The Rock"" Johnson as a bad boy hockey player turned temporary tooth fairy could have made for a breezy 100 minutes of harmless movie fluff for kids. Instead, ""The Tooth Fairy"" is dragged down to direct-to-video levels of horribleness by disjointed writing, annoying characters and an overemphasis on its ""dreams can come true"" message.
Johnson plays Derek ""The Tooth Fairy"" Thompson, an NHL has-been who recently relegated to sideshow status in the minor leagues, only brought on to please fans with bone-crushing hits that literally knock teeth out. Derek's major problem, however, is that he crushes dreams, telling one child fan that he will never get into the NHL, and to ""lower his expectations."" Later on, Derek steals money from under his girlfriend's daughter's pillow for a poker game and tries to tell her the Tooth Fairy doesn't exist, something his girlfriend Carly (Ashley Judd) considers so offensive she kicks him out of the house. That night, Derek is transported to Fairy Land, where he meets his court worker Tracy (Stephen Merchant) and the head fairy Lily (Julie Andrews), who sentences him to two weeks of tooth fairy community service for his ""dissemination of disbelief.""
One of the most grating aspects of ""The Tooth Fairy"" is how unlikable and one-dimensional every single character is. Judd falls completely flat as the divorced mother with kids, Andrews looks worn out as the head fairy, and teen skateboarding dreamboat Ryan Sheckler is a pest as teen hockey phenom Mick Donnelly. Merchant fares the worst, as his sniveling court worker Tracy is so unlikable that audiences may find it tough to sympathize with his dream of becoming a real tooth fairy, even though he doesn't have wings.
Oh, did I not mention Tracy has wing envy? Well, the movie barely does either, relying on a strange homoerotic montage of glowing wings to fill in the cavity-sized plot holes. ""The Tooth Fairy"" tends to jump from one plot point to the next, leaving the feeling that each of the five credited writers wrote their own version of the movie, then met up and selected the best scenes from each. The only consistent theme throughout the film is its exaggerated ""follow your dreams"" message. Every scene in which Johnson dares speak frankly to a kid about his dreams ends in wild reactions, from his girlfriend throwing him out to her son smashing his electric guitar because Derek tells him he probably won't be as good as Eric Clapton.
Apart from a brief cameo by Billy Crystal and a few laughs involving some Tooth Fairy goodies (shrinking paste and amnesia dust are pretty hard concepts to mess up), ""The Tooth Fairy"" is terrible. ""Tooth"" be told, if the writers hadn't decided to ""wing"" it, the film could've been ""fairy"" good. Sorry Rock, but like your movie posters say, sometimes the ""Tooth"" hurts.
