Lemony Snicket’s an Unfortunate Disappointment

Welcome, dear Reader, to the review of the new fantastical family adventure Lemony Snicket’s a Series of Unfortunate Events featuring the comedic chameleon talents of one James ‘Jim’ Carrey. Based on the obscenely and deviously oh-so popular novellas by Daniel Handler, it is my odious job to write down thoughts and observations in regards to the work’s transition to the silver screen. Please, I urge you, dear Reader, to turn away now if what you are looking for is a sun-shiny, twinkle-starred review, for what comes next is nowhere near as pleasant or uplifting. This is a dark, twisted tale of woe and missed opportunity, and, as such, I would not want to color any happy-go-lucky world view, dear Reader, you might have.

Okay – enough of that, I can only write in that voice for so long before my fingers and brain start to ache from the mind-numbingly banal pain. Granted, Handler shows an uncanny ability to not make this voice neither preposterous or tiresome in his agreeably entertaining books, and his tales are filled with such wickedly marvelous slight-of-hand acutely acerbic imagination that, for all their grade school simplicity, are wonderful late-night page turners.

The same cannot be said about this big screen adaptation. Based on three of the books, Series of Unfortunate Events comes off as an almost unavoidable rip-off of both the wickedly weird early films of Tim Burton and the recent Harry Potter adventures. There is little in the way of imagination in either concept of execution, and director Brad Silberling (Moonlight Mile) shows inexcusable laziness in slapping it together. It is a turgid, slow moving mess only enlivened by the perky fortitude of the trio of youngsters at its core.

The movie concerns the plight of the three Baudelaire children; problem-solving Violet (Emily Browning, Darkness Falls), voracious reader Klaus (Liam Aiken, Good Boy!) and infant biter Sunny (twins Shelby and Kara Hoffman). When their parents are killed in a mysterious fire, the three orphans are sent to live with their malevolent actor uncle Count Olaf (Carrey) but he could care less about any of them, his eyes set squarely on their parent’s vast fortune.

What proceeds is a series of vignettes as the children are sent from benefactor to benefactor, Olaf hot on their trail every step of the way doing all that he can to regain custody. At each stop, adults investigating the mysterious demises of each of Boudelaire’s caretakers refuse to believe the children or see through each of the Count’s silly and obsequious disguises. Through it all, the child refuse to abandon their faith in one another or in the belief something better indeed exists out there for all of them, using their intellect and inventiveness to escape each of Olaf’s deadly traps.

I love that the children never lose that faith. There is a wholesomely winning elegance to the fact that these close-knit siblings refuse to give in to all the horrors around them just as long as they stand tall together. They treat each other as equals, on an almost adult level, understanding every little flick of the wrist, tie of the hair or gurgle of baby talk. It’s a sublime relationship, one that really warms the heart and brang a smile to my face, but it’s just not enough.

Silberling can’t generate momentum, the film moving along with the ponderous self-importance of War & Peace, not a frolic-filled macabre holiday adventure. Meetings with Meryl Streep (as agoraphobic Aunt Jospehine) and Billy Connolly (as rambunctious and jovial reptile scientist Uncle Monty) are fun on a surface level but quickly grow tiresome as they linger on. There is no dramatic tension, no thematically interesting thread in Robert Gordon’s (Men in Black II) clichéd and unoriginal screenplay, both he and the director cribbing from everything from The Addams Family to Beetlejuice to Harry Potter to Shel Silverstein to Roald Dahl.

As for Carrey, his performance here is just more of the same over-the-top hysterics we’ve come to expect from him in pictures like this. If anything, he’s just redoing The Grinch all over, no new shading or character quirks to make Olaf exciting or different from what he’s done before. Even worse, Silberling peppers Lemony Snicket’s with a cadre of gifted comedic character actors like Timothy Spall (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), Catherine O’Hara (Surviving Christmas), Louis Guzmán (Traffic), Jennifer Coolidge (Legally Blonde) and Cedric the Entertainer (Barbershop) and then literally gives them nothing to do. Never has so much talent been wasted on so little, and just thinking about it brings my blood to boil.

And yet, there are things here I did enjoy. As I mentioned before, the kids are wonderful and I just adore how Sunny’s baby talk is completely understandable to both Violet and Klaus, as is their proper English back to her. Also, while Rick Heinrich’s (Hulk, Planet of the Apes) production design is unavoidably Burton-esque, it still doesn’t make it any less of a visual delight. Best of his designs: Josephine’s cliff side residence cobbled together with bits and pieces of driftwood hanging precariously over the steepest ledge this side of the Grand Canyon. Thomas Newman’s (Finding Nemo) familiar, intricate score is also quite wonderful, the tings and pings of the various chords and cymbals gloriously invigorating.

It’s not enough, however, and Lemony Snicket’s a Series of Unfortunate Events ends up not being remotely worth all the fuss or millions spent to put it together. Yes, dear Reader, this is nothing more than another Hollywood disappointment. Disappointment, as in being of particularly strong ideas and design and yet failing miserably as entertainment, family or otherwise.

Film Rating: êê  (out of 4)