Given the cast I thought I couldn't go wrong with this.
My mistake.
I felt the film a string of wasted opportunities. A cast to die for thrown at a script littered with tropes. A magical element very much underutilised. Questions left hanging unanswered but the mystery so little fleshed out that the absence of answers is met with a shrug in any case.
The characterisation is shallow. The misanthrope turned inexplicable saviour. Inexplicable dislike transformed into equally inexplicable friendship. And vice-versa. All these things could have been better set up, but instead they seemed to rely on the very existence of such tropes to work - oh, the audience is familiar with this sort of thing happening so they won't question it sort of logic. It happens in the movies so here it is again happening in a movie.
Throughout the film veers towards the mawkish on the back of a plot so threadbare that the moment you know what the crisis is you know precisely how it will be resolved by what means.
I boosted my rating a star or so in acknowledgement that this film is probably targeted at an older-children, young-adult audience and I just ain't there no more, but I can't help feeling this is one for conservative parents who see all the boxes ticked, the kind of parents whose children you feel sorry for if their children are actually capable of thinking.
Safe, predictable fare for unthinking children, then. Otherwise avoid. Above all, don't be seduced by that cast list.
My mistake.
I felt the film a string of wasted opportunities. A cast to die for thrown at a script littered with tropes. A magical element very much underutilised. Questions left hanging unanswered but the mystery so little fleshed out that the absence of answers is met with a shrug in any case.
The characterisation is shallow. The misanthrope turned inexplicable saviour. Inexplicable dislike transformed into equally inexplicable friendship. And vice-versa. All these things could have been better set up, but instead they seemed to rely on the very existence of such tropes to work - oh, the audience is familiar with this sort of thing happening so they won't question it sort of logic. It happens in the movies so here it is again happening in a movie.
Throughout the film veers towards the mawkish on the back of a plot so threadbare that the moment you know what the crisis is you know precisely how it will be resolved by what means.
I boosted my rating a star or so in acknowledgement that this film is probably targeted at an older-children, young-adult audience and I just ain't there no more, but I can't help feeling this is one for conservative parents who see all the boxes ticked, the kind of parents whose children you feel sorry for if their children are actually capable of thinking.
Safe, predictable fare for unthinking children, then. Otherwise avoid. Above all, don't be seduced by that cast list.