An average movie

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but, since it was directed by Robert Zemeckis, I still wanted to check it out. First of all, to be honest, I’m not really a huge fan of Roald Dahl’s work. Indeed, except for Wes Anderson’s stellar work and Tim Burton’s ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’, everything else adapted from his books always really bored me. As a result, I did see Nicolas Roeg’s version but, even if I didn’t remember much about it, I know that I barely cared for it when I saw it. As a result, I can’t say I was really excited by this new version from Zemeckis and, indeed, even if it was rather harmless, it was pretty tedious to behold. In my opinion, the issue is not even with Roeg’s or Zemeckis’s directing, it’s plain and simply a boring story. Maybe it works better as a book but I doubt it. At least, it gave the opportunity to Zemeckis to go wild with some cutting edge CGI, something he has been indulging ever since ‘Forrest Gump’ became a massive hit. Unfortunately, unlike James Cameron, Zemeckis’s obsession with tech and motion capture in particular never resulted in anything really mind-blowing so you wish he would finally let it go and tell a good story instead (It’s interesting that his most interesting movie from the last 30 years might be ‘Flight’, a good old drama with no technological wizardry involved). Concerning the cast, Octavia Spencer was basically born to play such warm and sweet characters. On the other hand, Anne Hathaway was not bad but, at the end of the day, there was no depth whatsoever with her Grand High Witch (she didn’t even have an actual name, for crying out loud…) and she was therefore actually pretty boring. Another thing that bothered me was the fact that the nameless main character acted and behaved completely differently when he was a boy and when he was a mouse. Eventually, there was some interesting dark undertones (which worked better in Roeg’s version) and it’s intriguing that, at the end, these 3 kids remain mice but nothing was done with this fact after all which was obviously rather unsatisfying. Anyway, to conclude, I’m afraid it was another misfire from Robert Zemeckis and you should probably avoid it. 

5/10