This 'prince' is one pauper

REVIEWED - THE PRINCE AND ME: A corn-fed Wisconsin honour student with ambitions to help starving babies meets a blonde prince, the world's most eligible bachelor, and, after she persuades him to stop being such a snooty prig, they fall in love and shock the world by announcing their engagement, writes Donald Clarke.

Well, I think we know which slice of royal beefcake The Prince and Me is supposed to be about. But the producers must have realised that even in Wisconsin one would expect college students to recognise Princess Diana's first-born (the hero is studying incognito, you see). So they invented their own imaginary kingdom. That unhappy country is called Denmark and, if its customs and traditions are any guide, it lies somewhere between Ruritania and Middle Earth.

Readers from the real Denmark, whose bicycling royal family is, in fact, famously informal, should have fun fulminating about the many inaccuracies in The Prince and Me. Everyone else beware. Given this synopsis, nobody should be surprised that the film turns out to be an even greater waste of the dignified Julia Stiles than Mona Lisa Smile.

Indeed, no sane person could expect The Prince and Me to be anything other than sentimental, cloying and trite. But did it have to be quite so boring? Sadly, director Martha Coolidge has chosen to introduce an entirely unwelcome strain of thoughtfulness to the piece. There is some chatter about the perils of globalisation, and the picture is edited with a leaden sluggishness more suited to the depiction of Iranian poverty than teenage romance.

It is also two bad films in one. The first three or four hours take us from initial friction to blossoming love and then, just when we think we will be allowed to abandon the betrothed to their happiness, we fly to Denmark so that Stiles can use the wrong knife, fall over in high heels and drop her tiara in the caviar. This is a dirty, dirty trick on parents and reviewers.

(A note to Northern Irish readers: the ghastly Eddie Irvine cameo happens in the first five minutes. So just leave your motorcar idling outside the cinema.)