The Tooth Fairy (2010)

  Elevator Pitch: A minor league ice hockey player, Derek Thompson, is known as “The Tooth Fairy” because he is used to beat up the opposition, sometimes resulting in loss of their molars. He is going out with a young mother with two children. One day he is almost telling his girlfriend’s young daughter that the Tooth Fairy (the one who exchanged a shed tooth for a dollar bill) does not exist, when he is transported into a world inhabited by the real tooth fairies and is sentenced to make good his blasphemy by fulfilling the role of tooth fairy for three weeks. This requires him at times to sprout wings and wear an electric blue costume, and to start with causes him to lose his girlfriend and become a bad hockey player. But with help, things get better.

Content: Dwayne Johnson stripped to the waist once, some rudish jokes, maybe the cause of the PG rating. The hockey games take place with some violence. Derek as a tooth fairy is amusingly dressed, sometimes with wings and is given a moderately hard time by the boss tooth fairy and his handler. Many jokey events as he does the job, including miniaturisation and confrontation with animals, causing people to forget they have seen him using amnesia dust, the sprouting of wings at inappropriate times, etc. ( I try never to use etc, but in this case it just seemed to be appropriate.)

A View: We have to wonder who this film was made for. If the jokes had been left out it might have suited children. But actually despite the negative reviews and limited plot, it made money, in a way foreshadowing Johnson’s later success which actually seems to have started with Fast & Furious 5 in 2011. Now, in 2020 he is the most successful actor in Hollywood. But back to the film, it tries, it has a story arc, Dwayne Johnson is mostly charming but still not really a watch even for nothing.

Additional Info: The script had been around for years, written in the mid 1990s as a vehicle for Arnie, but he chose “Last Action Hero” instead.