directed by Jon Favreau
screenplay by David Koepp and John Kamps
after the book by Chris Van Allsburg (2002)

113 min.

On a bus. A movie about a fantastical board game is predestined to be flimsy; it’s basically “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.”* To this movie we say: a whole bunch of stuff better jump out at me! And it better look like I’m about to hit something and then it falls away at the last second! The movie was scripted to include all these things and so there they were, but they fell flat – too flat to justify the movie, anyway. One problem is that the movie was edited at too slack a pace to evoke a roller-coaster. Another problem is that John Debney’s score refused to pick up any of the slack and just mailed in the usual outer-space choirs of awe, over and over again, to numbing effect. But the main overarching problem was one of attitude. In the movie, an astronaut character, played by one of these post-Generation-X boyish 30-year-old types, emerges from the game and takes on an avuncular role with the little kids whose movie this is. Despite being part of the fantasy – wearing a spacesuit, knowing about Zorgons, and so forth – he doesn’t seem to take it as reality. His manner is, like I say, avuncular; he seems to be Jon Favreau – I’m going to attribute this all to Jon Favreau because it fits with what I imagine his personality to be – playing babysitter and being proud of himself for being such a cool deadpan babysitter. “Okay, guys, the Zorgons are coming. There’s nothing funny about it. This is serious.” And that’s how the movie as a whole felt, like it was saying, “Look how seriously I’m taking this stuff. It’s fun and it’s also exciting. Look how fun and exciting it is when you kids get to hang out with me,” all the while looking forward to getting a beer afterward and saying something about how it’s no big deal to take care of cool kids – chicks eat that stuff up. Steven Spielberg would make this movie from the point of view of the kid – awed and terrified – whereas Jon Favreau made it from the point of view of the awesome babysitter. “Dude, this isn’t funny. This is scary.” Chris Van Allsburg’s books are all about that hovering, textural sense of mystery. I get the sense that there’s no room for that sort of thing in Jon Favreau’s personality. And without it, this premise has nowhere to go.

I’m skipping over the whole “we need a sentimental side story” sentimental side story about brotherly compassion, which was incoherent, and the stupid frame with Tim Robbins doing his best impression of a normal dad, and the kids not wanting to be left alone in this “big old spooky house” which is actually a completely un-forbidding, gorgeous, welcoming dream home. The movie encouraged you to skip over these things.

When it started – and the opening title sequence, featuring the “retro” game board designs, was attractive – I thought, “this is the perfect movie for a bus!” and became genuinely excited about what it might have in store for me. But by the middle, and certainly by the end, I was just bored. I think if I were still a kid I might have enjoyed it anyway. Kids are good at subconsciously filling in mystery and atmosphere on their own. Seemingly unobjectionable illustrations in kids’ books become too frightening to bear because they’re so rife with nightmarish implication. But now, as a jaded boyish 30-year-old type, that power has passed out of my subconscious and into my conscious will, and I don’t feel like putting in the sympathetic work to beef up the atmosphere of every bus movie that gets thrown my way. Of course, maybe that’s the very definition of the crankiness that characterizes the hopelessly grimacing adults in kids’ movies – the reluctance to shoulder too much of the burden in the process of being amused.

So, sure, if I had come to this movie with a fixation on outer-space make-believe, the movie would have provided me with the visuals to fuel my fixation. But I don’t really regret holding the movie responsible for selling me the idea that its premise was potentially delightful, or deeming it to have fallen short. When you’re old enough to know that a movie can be about a board game that takes you to outer space or about a serial killer who cuts the skin off his victims or about the Holocaust or about My Best Friend’s Wedding, you learn that directing your sense of interest is half the battle, and it is, indeed, the movie’s battle to fight. They almost had me there on the strength of the title sequence alone, and then they still lost me, because they weren’t really there themselves.

* By which I mean the Disneyland attraction, and not the latter half of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949), from whence the imagery, but not the mechanics, of “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.”