"Hannah Montana: The Movie" is not so much a movie as it is a trial balloon to see if Miley Cyrus, with her big blue eyes, exceptionally white teeth and increasingly long limbs, can hold the big screen as effectively as she has the small screen. The answer is yes.
Even almost completely stripped of the zinger-driven physical comedy that marks "Hannah Montana" the television show and saddled with what may be the most ridiculous climactic situation in teen-movie history, the film allows Cyrus to deliver a solid ingenue performance, shimmering where she needs to shimmer, sassing where she needs to sass and, most important, continuing to offer audiences the image of a lovely but still recognizable real girl onto whom they can project their own dreams.
Oh, and she sings at least two songs that will no doubt become big, big hits.
It isn't easy to take a slapstick sitcom shot on a soundstage and turn it into a dramatic feature film. The show's formula -- the banter-heavy high jinks of Miley Stewart (Cyrus), brother Jackson (Jason Earles), best friends Lilly (Emily Osment) and Oliver (Mitchel Musso) and lovable nemesis Rico (Moises Arias), inevitably tempered with a life lesson provided by dad Robby Ray Stewart (Billy Ray Cyrus) -- works well in a half-hour laugh-track-heavy format. In a full-length feature film? Well, as Miley would say, not so much.
So screenwriter Daniel Berendsen (the "Twitches" movies and "Sabrina the Teenage Witch") and director Peter Chelsom (2004's "Shall We Dance?") quickly put a great deal of literal and figurative distance between the film and the show. We meet Miley and company in Los Angeles, where the show takes place, through a peppy dance number set to the theme song "Best of Both Worlds."
But there is trouble in paradise. Hannah now has a publicist played by Vanessa Williams in only a slightly dialed-down version of "Ugly Betty's" Wilhelmina. There's also a sleazy tabloid journalist (Peter Gunn) prowling around (British, presumably to avoid offending the local entertainment press).
But that's not really the problem; the problem is that you can't really have the best of both worlds. As Hannah, Miley is in danger of becoming such a little diva -- she engages in a public shoe fight with Tyra Banks! She upstages Lilly's 16th birthday party! -- that Robby Ray yanks her home to the rolling green hills of Tennessee to visit her grandmother, remind her of her roots and straighten her the heck up.
