Babble

I liked the first and second Shrek films, but sadly, I find myself not as keen on Shrek the Third. The jokes aren't aimed at the parental chaperones this time around; the laughs mainly come from slapstick (though I agreed with the five-year-olds in attendance that Shrek's dream sequence with thousands of demanding mini-ogres was pretty funny). Grown-ups are meant, instead, to be relating to the film's plot: Shrek is growing older, and he's faced with new responsibilities, both in terms of parenting and Far Far Away governance. Shrek's not sure if he wants the mantle of authority — or a child, for that matter (too late, since Fiona's knocked up) — and so he decides to seek out the alternate candidate for the position of ruler, a young boy named Arthur. Between the Arthur plot and an elaborate Prince Charming coup-scheme, Donkey is unfortunately relegated to a much smaller role, and Puss in Boots relies on the same old catty tricks of yore. Your five-to-twelve-year olds will love it, but the parenting-responsibility theme just stressed me out. — Jordana Horn

Everybody loves Spider-Man. Not just Sam Raimi's hugely successful film franchise, but the lovable, guilt-ridden pile of wise-cracking psychoses that is Peter Parker. Adults can relate to the emotional turmoil Spidey faces in the aftermath of familial tragedy, and to his problems balancing his professional life with interpersonal relationships. Kids love him because he has the power to defeat his enemies, and because he wears a mask, so they can see themselves inside the costume. While the last two Spider-Man films gracefully provided all of this, Spider-Man 3 unfortunately fails to deliver the goods. This time, Spider-Man faces three separate villains and thus three disparate story threads. Spidey's conflicts with the Green Goblin, the Sandman, and the anti-Spider-Man, Venom, are held together by a flimsy redemption premise. It groans under the weight of multiple movies stuffed into a single, two-and-a-half-hour special effects extravaganza. It's sporadically thrilling (the superheroic effects are truly impressive), but ultimately exhausting (most of the kids in my screening got up for a walk around the ninety-minute mark). The climactic battle between Spider-Man and the film's antagonists looks and feels like a six-year-old's action figure drama. Except the six year-old's battle probably has a more logical set-up. — John Constantine

Any given five minutes of Disney's time-travel adventure Meet the Robinsons is a lot of fun. There's a swing band composed of martini-swilling frogs, a bowler hat that aspires to world domination and a future city where giant soap bubbles constitute mass transit — all of which would be delightful, if the film supported them with any kind of coherent story. Instead, we get a meandering yarn about an orphaned child prodigy who can't get anyone to adopt him, so he invents a machine that will show him the identity of his birth mother, but before he can get it to work, he's visited by a mysterious kid who whisks him off to the future where he meets an eccentric family that implores him to fix the machine or else he'll destroy the timeline and — I'll pause for a breath here, but the film takes no such luxuries. To compound the chaos, the entire movie is shown in 3D. It's very advanced 3D — the opening rainstorm that pours onto the audience is actually quite beautiful — but it results in dozens of labored site gags in which various objects, body parts and food items (like peanut butter and jelly, twice) are hurled at the viewer. The movie plays like a rambling joke told by a preschooler who doesn't yet grasp the concept of punch lines. Of course, if you happen to know such a preschooler, she'll probably love it. — Gwynne Watkins

I walked into TMNT wondering: is this new Ninja Turtles film meant for the Yu-Gi-Oh set, or will it be a straight-up action fest geared toward thirty-year-old nostalgia hounds? Turns out the movie is just as confused as I was. Opening with some awkward narration (courtesy of Laurence Fishburne), we get the short version of the Turtles' backstory. Then we're told about a nameless ancient warlord who opened an inter-dimensional portal three thousand years ago, unleashing thirteen monsters on Earth, turning his most trusted generals to stone, and making himself immortal. Right. This initial disconnect is jarring to say the least, and it ultimately colors the entire movie. It almost seems like writer/director Kevin Munroe had a screenplay for a CGI movie about ancient Mayan warriors that never got off the ground until the Ninja Turtles license landed in his lap.

When the story and animation focus solely on the Turtles, TMNT is entertaining and very pleasing to the eye. It manages to tap into the endearing quality that keeps the first live-action film, now almost two decades old, fresh beyond nostalgia — at its heart, it's a disarmingly earnest story about absurd characters. But everything else is lamentably clumsy, particularly the exaggerated design of the human characters. Something is hugely off when the most realistically proportioned characters in your movie are the anthropomorphic turtles. — John Constantine

Despite all the glowing orbs and grandiose statements in the trailer, The Last Mimzy is essentially the tale of a stuffed animal gone awry. Noah and Emma, two affluent Seattle suburban kids, find a box full of strange devices in the waves at their (enviable) beach house. They adopt the box's contents, which include a stuffed rabbit named Mimzy who talks in whale-like warbles, as fun new toys. After playing with these toys, however, Noah can suddenly draw Tibetan mandalas, perform telekinesis and chart arachnid sound emissions, while Emma learns the arts of levitation and telepathy. If you're thinking this doesn't really make sense, you're right. It makes even less sense once we learn that this is a care package from the future — a future that will never come to be, mind you, unless Emma and Noah take action. Then throw in the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. Overall, the movie is convoluted, and seems to rely too heavily on the "if something is cool, don't tell your parents about it" line of reasoning that always brings in the SWAT team (see E.T. as paradigmatic example). But if there actually were movie-tie-in merchandise that exponentially improved your kid's brain functioning, The Last Mimzy would make a killing. — Jordana Horn

True to the book on which it's based, Disney's Bridge to Terebithia is a lovely, poignant and unabashedly sad film. It tells the story of a friendship between two rural kids: Jess (Josh Hutcherson), a shy, artistic boy from a large, poor family, and Leslie (Annasophia Robb), a recent blue-state transplant who's the daughter of two novelists. Both are oddballs at their middle school and somewhat neglected by their parents, so they escape into Terebithia, an imaginary world of their own creation. Director Gabor Csupo is faithful to Katherine Patterson's sap-free novel, and the film is refreshingly spare with the CGI; we most often see Terebithia as the simple patch of woods it is, which adds to the magic when animated creatures start swooping in. The child actors, with the exception of poised Kiera Knightley look-alike Robb, give nicely rough-edged performances. Of course, anyone who read the book in fourth grade (spoiler warning for those who didn't) will recall that its major event is an unexpected death. The final act of the film pulls no emotional punches; the surviving child goes through all five stages of grief, culminating in the building of the titular bridge. As the credits rolled, I expected the children in the theater to be sobbing — but instead, they just looked incredibly pensive. Maybe, for a generation raised on Shrek sequels instead of Old Yeller, Bridge to Terebithia is a necessary dose of pathos. — Gwynne Watkins

Happily N'Ever After wants to be an edgy, derailed version of Cinderella. But for a movie that has unconventionality as its core (and only) concept, it's remarkably given to clichés. Our narrator, Rick the Servant (Freddie Prinze Jr.), isn't happy with "Ella" (Sarah Michelle Gellar) pining after the buff but daft Prince Charming. Rick thinks he would make Ella a far better mate, though it isn't clear in what way Rick is more interesting than the prince, besides being slight and brown-haired rather than blond and muscled. When the storyteller in charge of Fairytale Land goes for a golfing vacation in Scotland, leaving his two helpers to hold down the fort, chaos ensues. The evil stepmother (Sigourney Weaver) stages a take-over of the story, big bad wolves party in the castle (they all sound like extras from The Sopranos), the seven dwarves show up for a fight scene, and everything that's about to happen at any given moment is totally, painfully obvious. Most of the kids in the theater made a candy-run midway through; I should have followed them and not looked back.— Sarah Sundberg

Accomplished director Luc Besson has never been a fan of complex plots, so it would be pointless to knock this one for its simplistic storyline: ten-year-old Arthur (Freddie Highmore) lives with his grandmother (Mia Farrow) in a Connecticut farmhouse coveted by a ruthless businessman. Arthur's grandfather disappeared some years back, supposedly on a journey to the land of the Minimoys, a civilization of microscopic elfin creatures he discovered on a trip to Africa . Lured by the promise of hidden treasure, Arthur, too, gets drawn into the world of the Minimoys, becoming a mini-version of himself and helping this troubled kingdom in its struggle against an army of invading insects (led by the always welcome voice of David Bowie).

The film uneasily mixes twee nostalgia and contemporary pandering; even though the story takes place in the '60s, for example, a fight on a record player in the world of the Minimoys leaps through generations of contemporary music, all overseen by the street stylings of Snoop Dogg. But that's nothing new; the Shrek films regularly peddle such anachronisms. As annoying as it may be for adults, it's a minor nitpick. The real problem of Arthur and the Invisibles is how lazy and uninspired it all is, with the Minimoys designed to look like standard-issue video game avatars, and the breakneck escapes of the strung-together plot coming straight out of Saturday morning TV. Good kid flicks have a genuine ability to awe, to envelop us and make us suspend disbelief. Here, the only disbelief comes from wondering how one of the more inventive action filmmakers of the past two decades directed his energies towards creating something so disappointingly facile. — Bilge Ebiri

The title of this film is a little misleading, as sad-sack security guard Ben Stiller winds up spending not one, but three nights in the Museum of Natural History, figuring out how to rein in several floors' worth of unruly, enchanted exhibits. A pretty tall order, given that he must also nab the crooks who stole an ancient Egyptian tablet, spark what passes for romance with an implausible bombshell docent, and, yawn, bolster his son's flagging faith in him.

Had director Shawn Levy been disciplined enough to end this tale with Stiller's first sunrise, Night at the Museum could have been something really special, an Animal House for the elementary school set. There's a gleeful anarchy at play in scenes where our hero is besieged in short order by a host of reanimated African mammals, thumb-sized Roman soldiers and the bones of a briefly terrifying Tyrannosaurus Rex. Unfortunately, the script demands that Stiller must learn something in the process, specifically some soppy, generic trope about believing in yourself before your kid can believe in you, too.

This sort of synthetic quest for meaning only detracts from the dramatization of what every museumgoer has long suspected: those dioramas come to life the second you turn your back. —Ayun Halliday