The Spiderwick Chronicles (2008)

Ah, bank holiday Mondays, those wonderful, magical days when I know I never need to hunt for something mildly interesting to review because there'll be at least four or five served up on a plate by the major TV channels. Granted, it can be a bit of a lottery as to what you get, but honestly? That's half the charm.

I've been in a pleasantly lazy mood today - too lazy, certainly, to look at more than the titles and synopses of the day's options. There were a few definite possibles, but in the end my eye was caught by The Spiderwick Chronicles, apparently based on a series of bestselling books about a bestiary of magical creatures. The title and the covers of the books in the library where I work both evoked memories of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, a delightful, mischievous little piece, and as I was in the mood to be delighted with mischief, I settled down with high hopes and a nice hot cup of tea.

Our protagonists here are the Grace family - twins Simon and Jared (both played by Freddie Highmore), older sister Mallory (Sarah Bolger) and mother Helen (Mary-Louise Parker), who move to an old country estate in the wake of Helen's separation from the children's father. 

A born troublemaker, it doesn't take long for Jared to find the aforementioned magical bestiary. Unfortunately, it turns out to have been hidden for a reason, and soon the family are fighting for their lives against the villainous ogre Mulgarath, who longs to slay the other faerie races in order to become the most powerful creature in the world...

The good

A bunch of nice effects work and some appealing character design here, particularly with the goblins, who resembled nothing so much as loosely anthropomorphised toads. None of the CGI work was particularly glaringly obvious, even the griffin that showed up towards the end of proceedings, and whatever techniques were used to duplicate Freddie Highmore were enough to convince on the small screen, at least.

It's all kid-friendly stuff, provided your kids don't have a problem with homicidal monsters; director Mark Waters dips fairly deeply into the Big Bag of Cheap Horror Scare Tactics, but very little here is genuinely upsetting barring one or two well-telegraphed moments near the end. The comedy is broad without being scatological, and if the dialogue doesn't quite pass the Bechdel test, we are at least provided with two strong, brave role models in Helen and Mallory.

The bad 

Remember that delight and mischief I described myself as so eagerly hoping for a few paragraphs ago? I believe the relevant descriptive phrase here would be shit out of luck. It's not that it's particularly rare for a film to be this charmless, it's just that murderously violent or not, magical creatures are supposed to evoke a sense of wonder. As brownie Thimbletack and hobgoblin Hogsqueal respectively, Martin Short and Seth Rogen did the best they could with cringe-inducing material, but Nick Nolte's Mulgarath lacked the seductive edge of the best mythical villains, leaving him bloodless and frankly rather uninteresting.

What I found really grated, however, was the way that pretty much everybody in the movie delivered pretty much every line as though they hated pretty much everybody else. Highmore was the worst offender, I thought, and at times he seemed to be channeling two separate versions of Will Arnett's Lego Batman. Shouty and ugly-sounding, the dialogue's only saving grace was that it distracted the attention from James Horner's sweepingly manipulative score.

The verdict

Is The Spiderwick Chronicles a bad film? Probably not, not especially. It's easy on the eye and light on the moralising, and deserves credit for compressing the five slim volumes it tackles into a single film rather than trying to cash in by stretching it out to franchise length. It's loud, however, and aggressive, and scores low in the likeability stakes. Passable entertainment for bored tweenagers at the arse end of a long weekend, I suppose, but definitely not something to bother looking out for.