Lemony Snicket - Shove the kids aside for this one

The Baudelaire children suffer a series of unfortunate events, starting with the loss of their beloved parents. Fortunately for us, their trials are ours to watch and enjoy.

Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events is a delight for the patient adult viewer, one who can appreciate the slow development of story and incredible character development. It is not, however, a children’s movie. The kids sitting around me in the theatre were restless during the entire movie. It not only did not keep their interest, it was frightening to the younger children in the audience.

As a young friend of mine warned me even before I entered the movie house, this is not a movie for kids even though it’s advertised as such. Their loss, our gain.

The casting is genius. Jim Carrey is menacing but laughably funny. It took me awhile to catch on to some of his disguises, as his voice is even changed. The poor Baudelaire kids are being stalked by Uncle Olaf,(as it turns out) a pretty good actor who does all he can to kill off the competition so that the Baudelaire fortune is his. Timothy Spall (the evil rodent in the last Harry Potter installment) is brilliantly adept as Mr. Po, the banker who keeps driving them to the next relative who is not a relative. And Meryl Streep is so unstreepish, she’s terribly delightful. And grammatically correct, even when faced with death.

The secrets of the Baudelaires and their spyglass friends are not revealed here. We can only hope for a sequel. But only with the same cast. Even the dead ones.