The Princess Bride

Rating: 3/4 (An entertaining comic fantasy for child and adult alike)

I love discovering new movies by serendipity! 😊 I was reading Essential C# 4.0, a book on programming recently. Instead of the typical “Hello World!” example, the opening chapter of this book used the greeting “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” It was this strange greeting that led me to watch The Princess Bride, a romance-comedy-adventure-fantasy tale. It is based on a novel of the same name by William Goldman, which, in the movie, is read by a grandfather to his sick grandchild.

Buttercup and Westley live on a farm and are in love with each other. Westley goes away on a long journey and Buttercup soon learns that he died on the high seas. While she is wallowing in her sorrow, Prince Humperdinck chooses her to be his bride. While on a ride in the woods, she is kidnapped by a gang. The gang consists of a short, clever and devious man named Vizzini, a giant named Fezzik and a fencing master named Inigo Montoya. They are pursued by a masked man, who defeats them all and reveals himself as Westley to Buttercup. Westley becomes friends with Fezzik and Inigo, the latter revealing to him that he is in pursuit of a six-fingered man who killed his father. Prince Humperdinck tricks them, imprisons Westley and takes away Buttercup to marry her as part of his evil plan. It is up to the hodgepodge duo of Fezzik and Inigo to thwart his plans.

The Princess Bride feels like a breath of fresh air. With a light-hearted story that is full of comedic capers, it is refreshingly different from today’s Disney-isque fantasies full of noisy expensive special effects and produced with the sole intention of selling movie paraphernalia and possible sequels. The plot intrigues, entertains and evokes laughs with ease. The Princess Bride is an entertaining fantasy for child and adult alike.