Ok, I saw the Lemon Snickers movie this past Sunday. I don’t know the real title, but that’s suggestive of it. Oh crap, I have to put the title in or nobody will find my blog entry…hold on…wait for it…ahh! Lemony Snicket, that’s the name.

Anyway, what a disappointing movie! I use the word very deliberately. This movie could have been so much more. I like well-made moves, no matter the intended audience (e.g. Pixar movies), so it wasnt’ a case of me not being the right age to appreciate the movie. I liked each and every actor chosen to play a role in this movie; Jim Carey was great, as were the child actors, and the tiny role John Cleese had. The plot was even headed in the right drection, but then it stopped!

This movie was a story of a wonderfully imaginative casting director, screenwriter and set designer, afflicted by a horrible producer. Or maybe the screenwriter died 1/3 through the moviemaking. Hard to tell.

Continue reading to see plot discussion that some may consider spoilers.

The trailers for this movie imply some fantastical and supernatural happenings. The three-eyed frog comes to mind. It’s not even subtle. A three-eyed frog demands a [insert latin here for "a reason to exist" so that I look really smart]. But no, the herpetologist, played smartly by Cleese, just briefly alludes to finding his animals on his adventures. Nothing supernatural, nothing wonderous.

The three children who are orphaned at the beginning of the movie are introduced as having some special traits. The girl is an inventor, the boy is a voracious reader with a perfect memory, and the baby is just voracious. She bites stuff. The children’s traits are used in a few scenes in the movie to good effect, but not nearly enough. You wonder at the end why they bothered. I liken it to seeing an episode of MacGyver where he had some tools in front of him and he just couldn’t think of anything cool to make of them. In fact, a scene like that happened with the inventor girl. Lame.

But the worst fault in the plot was a repeated allusion to some secret society to which the orphans’ family members belonged. It’s never explained! And the mysterious fiery murders of all of the society members? It’s a very mundane plot by Carey’s character to attain the family fortune.

There was so much promise in the hints of secrecy and mystery that I’ve explained above that by the end of the movie I couldn’t stand it! I tell you what they should have done. They should have begun the movie like they did, off the parents, suggest the secret society, introduce the evil Baron, then have the kids whisked off to another world full of three-eyed frogs and carniverous leeches. Then they start talking about how the secret society is a group of people from this other world who have strange powers and whatnot. Then you have a million things you could do with the plot and how the Baron needs the kid’s brains for some nefarious complicated scheme, not because he just wants money.

As you might can tell, I have strong feelings about this. Ugh.