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This movie should disappear
ARTHUR AND THE INVISIBLES
Directed by Luc Besson
Certificate PG
THIS is a despicable waste of money and time. I don’t recall ever seeing such a charmless stab at a children’s film.
And one of the reasons it is such a huge disappointment is the director, Luc Besson, has an otherwise admirable track record, while the French film-going public – meant to be among the most discerning in the world – lapped this up.
Its failings are so numerous it is hard to know where to start.
Firstly, the mashed-up plot borrows concepts from other children’s stories and then fails to settle on one or another, meaning at any given moment you are not quite sure what quest young Arthur is actually embarking on. Is he attempting to find his missing grandfather? Or defeat the enemy of the Minimoys?
Pinching ideas from other children’s stories and turning them into goobledigook is the basic premise. In one scene, Arthur pulls a sword form a stone – thus showing his credentials as what, exactly? For a film-maker of Luc Besson’s undoubted talent and imagination, this is unimaginative pap.
Little Arthur is living in a rambling old house on the prairie with his gran. We don’t know why his parents have left him.
They are painted on the one hand as uncaring, unloving, people who have sent him off to boarding school in England and who won’t even come to see him on his birthday. Then, the next minute, they are portrayed as hard-working souls who make sacrifices for their child.
Arthur’s grandfather was a great African explorer who mysteriously disappeared. It so transpires, after Arthur has spent all of two minutes unravelling some clues he was left by his gramps, that grand-dad has shrunk and is living in the long grass at the bottom of the garden with a race of mini-elfy things.
And unless Arthur finds him and a bag of rubies he has, the farm is going to be sold to an evil property developer. (Remember the Goonies, anyone?)
So off Arthur goes to find him, and that is about it.
To do so, he turns, like the Water Babies, into a cartoon. The animation is ugly, the characters looking like the sort of plastic gimmick fast food restaurants give away with their meal deals.
Some scenes are impossible to look at, with these troll-like characters skipping ludicrously about the place. It gave me a headache.
The cast is great to name check, but makes the fact this film is so poor even more amazing.
Mia Farrow as the grandmother cannot raise the bar.
Throw in David Bowie, Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel and Emilio Estevez and the fact not one of the characters has a personality is even more surprising.
But Madonna’s Elfin Princess, whom Arthur falls for, is perhaps the worst of the lot. She plays the sort of creature she would write about in her awful attempt to re-cast herself as a children’s writer. It sums up this charmless stinker of a children’s film.
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