If you are a Harry Potter fan, stop reading and leave now!
If you like watching ’happily ever after’ stories, this isn’t your cup of tea.
If you’re looking for me to tell you to watch this movie, you’re wasting your time. That is something you have to decide after reading my review.
= I can only narrate what transpires in this movie. I begin:
The title is a dead giveaway. This is a movie full of unfortunate incidents that never ever seem to end. The mysterious narrator, Lemony Snicket is seen typing away in a clocktower, the rather disturbing tale of the wealthy Baudelaire children whose parents are killed in a fire. They are summarily sent to live with a rather nasty old man called Count Olaf (Jim Carrey) who wants to seize their fortune, and is ready to go to any lengths to get his hands on it.
The three Baudelaire orphans: Violet (age 14) (Emily Browning), Klaus (Liam Aiken; last seen in Road to Perdition as Tom Hank’s younger son), and Sunny (played by twins Kara & Shelby Hoffman) have a tough time dealing with Count Olaf, who treats them like animals, and are luckily sent off to a snake-loving uncle, Montgomery Montgomery (Billy Conolly; last seen in The Last Samurai, as Cruise’s companion) and thereafter live with a grammar-crazy Aunt Josephine (an over-the-top Meryl Streep).
Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Incidents, the movie has elements taken from the first three books of the series: The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room, and The Wide Window.
MY REVIEW
Visually, this movie is aesthetically balanced and technically brilliant. The sets are (how should I put this?) ’different’ from anything you can imagine. The director, Brad Silberling (he directed the Meg Ryan-Nick Cage starrer City of Angels) has done his job so well that it is almost too difficult to criticise his work here.
The actors playing the Baudelaire children are definitely much better actors than those insufferable actors that form the Harry Potter scene.
There is a quiet dignity lent to the feeling of loss that engulfs the orphans. But they never cry.
Jim Carrey being Jim Carrey almost overdoes it as the conniving failed theatre actor, Count Olaf, who lives in a disgusting house and has the most disgusting habits.
This is a film about resurgent hope despite the uncertainty in life. Yet the theme is not preachy.
Comic relief comes in the form of little Sunny Baudelaire whose hobby it is to bite. What, you ask? Anything she can get her teeth on. She is the only actor with the best dialogues (gibberish; translated into readable English subtitles).
Meryl Streep is delightful as the grammarian Aunt Josephine, once-adventurous tomboy reduced to a frail, fraidy woman.
Special effects are used sparingly. Two scenes that have you biting your nails are when the Baudelaires get out of Olaf’s locked car that he leaves stranded on the railway crossing; and when he is about to marry Violet in a seemingly mock-wedding in a play and Klaus trying to stop it. Aunt Josephine’s house on Lake Lachrymose has a beautiful, fragile air and yet is exceedingly scary.
Is consistently entertaining, and yet intermittently depressing as well.
Watch at your own risk.