Lost Boy
Luc Besson's children's story is derivative and uninspired
By Andy Klein
It is, perhaps, ironic that the same day Guillermo del Toro's wonderful Pan's Labyrinth hits L.A. theaters, we also get the opening of Luc Besson's Arthur and the Invisibles, which might, in a brief synopsis, sound similar. It is, in fact, wholly different ... in quality, as well as story, sad to say.
Both involve children with real-world problems entering into fantasy worlds. This time around, the troubled pre-pube is a boy named Arthur (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory's Freddie Highmore): An evil land developer (Adam LeFevre) is about to seize possession of the Connecticut home Arthur shares with his somewhat ditzy grandmother (Mia Farrow, who just will never look like a grandmother, despite being handily old enough). Apparently, this scheme can be halted if Arthur's long-missing grandfather shows up to sign some papers or if Arthur can locate Grandpa's stash of storybook rubies ... or something. So Arthur gets himself turned into a CGI approximation of a stop-motion puppet so he can enter into the world of Minimoys - teenyweeny little critters who apparently live in his garden.
The Minimoys mostly look like the gnomes made popular by Rien Poortvliet and Wil Huygen's picture book a couple of decades ago. They are, I suppose, literal garden gnomes. Arthur - whose British accent is lamely explained away in a single line of dialogue that fails to explain all the other inappropriate accents - encounters a saucy Minimoy princess (voice of Madonna) and has to team up with her against the evil Maltazard (voice of David Bowie), whose name one must never utter, as though it was, I don't know, Voldemort or something.
Besson has been working on this project for many years, so it's hard to fault him for some of its overly familiar elements; nonetheless, there's very little here that we haven't seen elsewhere (and better) within the last year, in Flushed Away and The Ant Bully, for a start. It may not all be derivative, but it feels that way. And some of the stuff ... well ... if you're going to have a kid named Arthur prove his specialness by pulling a sword from a stone, do something more with it. Don't just stick in the reference and then drop it.
Where del Toro's film deftly and meaningfully intercuts fantasy and the real world, Arthur's frequent returns to reality break the mood and seem to serve little narrative purpose besides beefing up Farrow's role.
In the realm of action films, Besson has done excellent and highly influential work: as writer/producer/director on La Femme Nikita and The Professional; as writer and/or producer on Wasabi, District B13, the Transporter films, and many others. But his attempts to deal with other kinds of material have been less impressive. The last time he tried to stretch - with The Messenger, the Joan of Arc epic he built around then-wife Milla Jovovich - the results verged on the embarrassing. Here, the amazing voice cast he's assembled, including (in addition to those already named) Anthony Anderson, Robert De Niro, Snoop Dogg, and Harvey Keitel, is wasted.
This is Besson's adaptation of his own children's story, written for his own children, who doubtless loved it. Well, I've got the same message for him that I had for M. Night Shyamalan, re Lady in the Water: Just because your kids think it's great doesn't mean bupkes. When I was eight, day camp counselor/driver Bernie Snyder used to keep us all riveted with tales of an adventurer named - if memory serves - Ben Gurin; we were too young to realize that the name was a corruption of a Zionist hero or that the stories (ironically, in retrospect) were mostly reconfigurations of stuff - magic rings! cloaks of invisibility! rescues by faithful animal friends! - from The Arabian Nights.
But what sounds great to a bunch of neighborhood kids on a summer afternoon will not necessarily play so well for the rest of the world - a lesson that Shyamalan and Besson appear not to have learned.
Published: 12/28/2006
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