A Series of Unfortunate Events

This movie, based on the popular children's books by Daniel Handler AKA Lemony Snicket was the obvious choice for a Christmas family outing, it's fun, and the kids outsmart all the mean grown-ups and blah blah blah. Pretty much it follows the paths of Violet Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire, three orphaned children with miserable lives, the books are funny in a twisted way but nonetheless enjoyable. I had high hopes for this movie, but underneath it all I really knew how it would be. I am sorry to say I was right. I'll start with the simple things like speed. The movie covers the first three books, understandable after all they're pretty short, but they cut the movie down to about 1 hour and 45 minutes, why not stretch it to 3 hours? Other long book adaptions have been long, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, etc, why couldn't they let this last a while to let us savor the funny situations, and maybe give us some more character development. The costumes were just poorly done, they were supposed to be all fun and imaginative, but honestly, Violet with all her pleather boots and fisjnets look like a street walker, and count Olaf was always in one overdone costume or the other. All in all the outfits just didn't work with the story. But the one thing, the true downfall of this sad little movie was Jim Carey. If you've read the books you could have seen this coming, Count Olaf is a wicked evil man who is not funny, not bouncy, and want with everything in him to kill the three children with his own hands, and take their money. This sounds harsh, but that's the way it is, and the short sighted people in Hollywood couldn't see this they only saw money, and the appeal to idiots that Jim Carey has. He was all uppity, and happy, like oh yeah kids...I'm gonna get you...Better run away (wink, wink). He never once convinced me that he actually had ill intention, he just wrecked the role, and now that he's got a hold, he'll stay on board to wreck the whole series. There two good things in this movie, if you must know, and they were these: Jude Law as the Narrator, and Sunny the four toothed infant, that was about it. I sound like I'm exaggerating, but I'm not, the whole movie from the happy little beginning, to the rapid conclusion, which was out of place in the course of the story, lived up to it's name as just one long series (lame but true) of unfortunate events.

B-