Lemony Snicket's A Series Of Unfortunate Events (2004)

It's better than I expected, but I think ultimately the movie suffers a lot of the same faults at the books, and frankly, I don't think this specific franchise was ever suited for movies. The Netflix TV series was (to say the least) but it was able to tell the whole story in that given format. They can only adapt three books here, and even if the movie was financially successful, the Baudelaire child actors had already aged out of their roles.

Jude Law is okay as Lemony Snicket but if you ask me he doesn't do enough deadpan overexplaining of easy to understand words, which is a hallmark of the fake author. Say what you will about Patrick Warburton, no doubt a controversial casting choice for the TV series, Puddy's the dude who knows deadpan.

I actually think Jim Carrey is MUCH better in the role of Count Olaf than Neil Patrick Harris. For NPH, I see him playing a character. Carrey vanishes into the role instead. Another selling point to Carrey is that he is able to do completely new and different personas for the false identities Count Olaf hides behind. Olaf is supposedly a terrible actor. But if that were true, why would ANY of the adults fall for his b.s..?

I very much disliked the early books of the series. Because Snicket was showing bad things happening, and he wanted to use the same villain every book, A Series Of Unfortunate Events is arguably the biggest, well-known project to suffer from the worst cases of plot related stupidity in living memory. You see characters behaving this dumbly anywhere else, it's either a horror film or a porno. And as the books went on, that sort of became the point, and why the Baudelaires couldn't trust any adults, and had to survive on their own. But I appreciated the movie sort of took one of those themes from the later books with Olaf insisting Mr. Poe is the monster because he never listened to the children. I mean really, what kind of judge would participate in a play with an elderly man marries a 14 year old and insists they both use their real names and sign actual documents? The idea that she went along with that is exactly as disgusting as Olaf coming up with it in the first place. No red flags there? You see why I hated the early books?

Interestingly, the actors they got for Violet and Klaus look shockingly similar to the kids they cast a decade later on the TV show. It's like I know the girl who plays Violet here is an entirely different person. But she looks and acts entirely the same.

For the record, the movie doing away with Mr. Poe's coughing quirk is the right move. It doesn't work on film. K Todd Freeman's Poe is FAR more awkward than he should be because of it. It's an uneasy characteristic that grinds things to a screeching halt to see it on film, instead of hearing about it in a throwaway sentence in a book.

Speaking of which, I mentioned this in my review for the series, but I'll go even further with a few years hindsight. I was of the opinion that the idea of Violet tying up her hair with a ribbon as a way to show she's just gotten a brilliant idea doesn't translate on film. I'm amending that statement. It doesn't actually make any sense in the books either. If it looks stupid and random and like it doesn't actually matter or mean anything in the movie, it's because the idea is dumb. Not because it's unfilmable. I was giving Daniel Handler there more credit than he was due in those reviews.

I think the most objectionable thing about the movie to me is the happy, satisfying ending. And it's because it's Hollywood. Let me clear: I totally understood and agreed with Handler actually giving the last book a happy-seeming ending. That's appropriate. To do it at the end of the FIRST movie? One of the season finale's bummer endings had a great song illustrating why this shouldn't happen. The song was called, "That's Not How The Story Goes." Which is the precise reason the happy ending doesn't work here.

I think we've had enough screen adaptations of this project. But I can safely say turning it into a live-action movie franchise doesn't work even if this movie itself is all right. ***1 removed link