Remember The King and I? Well, here's The Prince & Me, its lowered pretensions represented by the reduction in rank, the ampersand and the use of "me" instead of "I." Julia Stiles is a UW coed who fakes her own abduction. Just kidding. She's a UW coed who has both feet on the ground and both eyes focused squarely on med school. Then she meets "Eddie" (Luke Mably) at a place that's trying to pass itself off as the Rathskellar. Eddie's a European playboy who turns out to be not such a bad guy plus the crown prince of Denmark. The problem is, Stiles' Paige wasn't singing "Someday, my prince will come." She was singing "Someday, my MCAT will come." How can you work for Doctors Without Borders -" Paige's dream job -" if you're the Queen of Denmark?
That's not exactly a question the average coed has to ask herself these days. But there is the more general question of career versus love, of which The Prince & Me poses the reel-life fairy-tale version. I wouldn't say it poses it particularly well. The writing's pretty slack, and director Martha Coolidge, who used to do much more interesting work (Rambling Rose, for instance), doesn't seem to be fully engaged in this Dairyland variant on Roman Holiday. But to the movie's target audience -" young girls who fantasize about filling the position left vacant by Princess Di's death "- none of this will probably matter. Mably looks like Prince William, he speaks with a British accent, and he's got his own country. How charming can you get?
