The Spiderwick Chronicles
Director: Mark Waters
Year Released: 2008
Rating: 0.5
A case of Bad Dad-ism exists in (yet) another proto-Potter kid fantasy: the first is Audubon-esque Spiderwick (David Strathairn), whose obsession with fairies and griffons leads him to neglect and abandon his young daughter, the other is Brat Pack-esque Andrew McCarthy, who leaves his wife and kids for another woman and another life (and gets symbolically killed by his own son by a knife-phallus). I kept waiting for the 'wonder' and 'pure magic' you so often read about in reviews to come to the surface, but this is deadly dull, with plastic, uninteresting kids (Mr. Panayides is right: Freddie Highmore is a terrible actor, and to see him play two roles is double the torture), a mediocre plot (which has to do with a book of drawings and trolls) and heaps of bland CGI. The most gruesome thing in this is Nick Nolte, and that's due to hard living, not latex appliances.
