Tooth Fairy (2010)

Dwayne Johnson plays Derek Thompson, a minor league hockey enforcer whose specialty is removing opponents' teeth, and who makes the tactical error of telling a six-year-old girl that the tooth fairy does not exist. For this he is conscripted into the fairy realm, issued wings and a tutu, and sentenced to two weeks of nocturnal collection duty under the supervision of Julie Andrews. The architecture is familiar to the point of comfort: a selfish man humbled by magic, a girlfriend with children to win over, a redemption arc with a proposal at the end. We have attended this film many times before, and this iteration does not improve on the recipe.

On the question of social consciousness, the ledger is thin. Johnson's presence as a Samoan and Black leading man in a mainstream family comedy of 2010 merits a modest notation, though the film never glances at the fact. His identity sits outside the text entirely. Race is not examined, queerness does not appear in any register, and gender politics, climate, class, body image and neurodivergence are all absent. The hockey sequences are built on the violent extraction of teeth, which is not a body-positive thesis so much as an occupational dental hazard played for slapstick. The fairy bureaucracy functions as a workplace comedy with wings, and it takes no interest in the labor conditions of its employees.

What remains is sentiment. The film's moral, that dreams deserve belief and children deserve indulgence, arrives with the soft pressure of a bedtime story. It lectures, but gently, and about nothing more divisive than the value of optimism. A picture can be amiable and empty at once, and this one manages the trick without apparent effort. The tooth is collected, the amnesia dust is spread, the audience is politely dismissed, and we are left with the curious sensation of having watched one hundred and one minutes of professional competence arranged carefully around a void.