If only they hadn't used the name “Nancy Drew,” the movie Nancy Drew would have qualified as a pretty good pre-teen chick flick.

The one thing they got right was that the mystery itself was a pretty good one. And they hit the right tone with “supernatural” events that always have a natural explanation. If you're doing a Nancy Drew and you have a hidden staircase, people with disguised identities, and Nancy having to be resourceful and rescue herself from tight spots, you know what you're doing.

Unfortunately, there's this other movie going on at the same time, using the same actors, and constantly interrupting the pretty-good mystery. This other movie is a cheap teen flick about a girl who, due to mental illness, dresses in retro garb and is completely oblivious to how she doesn't fit in with other people. Eventually, without every understanding or learning anything, she is accepted because in true idiot savant fashion, she saves the day.

That movie was kind of embarrassing, and I felt bad for the actress trying to play the insane girl.

I felt a whole lot worse because they kept calling the insane girl “Nancy Drew.”

Trapped in the Past

In the books, Nancy Drew was never written to be trapped in a bygone era. In fact, they've updated the series twice to try to keep her from getting too dated. But when a series is popular year after year, decade after decade, what was meant as contemporary literature becomes historical.

It's fine to update her. It's not fine to mock her for being old-fashioned when she wasn't old-fashioned as first written.

In the books, Nancy's father is the editor of a major metropolitan newspaper. He's smart, he has money, he knows everybody and is accepted at all levels of society. Nancy has grown up with money, but she isn't impressed with herself. She, like her father, feels a responsibility to make the world a better place.

In the movie, “sleuthing” is an obsession that makes her a complete dweeb. In the books, she stumbles into situations where somebody is miserable and there are clues to how things might be set to rights. In other words, it is her brains, her courage, and her compassion that keep embroiling her in mysteries.

Not a Funny Joke

In this movie, however, her sleuthing is a joke — not a funny one, but a joke — with the police chief and the crooks playing a parody role. It's a joke movie at the level of Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead.

The result is a movie that lurches back and forth between pretty good and disastrously bad, with poor Emma Roberts torn between playing the spunky but delusional Nancy in the bad movie and the smart, courageous, and clever Nancy in the pretty good one.

The theater was full of teenage girls and quite a few of their mothers. Those who have grown up with the “real” Nancy Drew are going to be bothered, even offended by the patronizing way she is treated during the bad-movie sections. But the good-movie parts will probably make up for it.

The sad thing is that a sequel is already scheduled, and no doubt the same director is going to make the same deeply stupid mistakes.

Meanwhile, the real Nancy Drew movie still is waiting to be made. This one has postponed the good one by a decade.