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THE AMAZING MAURICE
Director: Toby Genkel Cast: The voices of Hugh Laurie, Emilia Clarke, Himesh Patel, Ariyon Bakare, David Tennant, Gemma Arterton, Joe Sugg, Julie Atherton, David Thewlis, Rob Brydon, Hugh Bonneville, Peter Serafinowicz MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:33 Release Date: 2/3/23 |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 2, 2023 From the start, The Amazing Maurice establishes itself as a very self-aware take on some form of fairy tale. One of our narrators—and the movie makes a point of joking about the notion of having more than one—is a very clever, very well-read young woman who knows everything there is to know about storytelling. The expectation, perhaps, is that the filmmakers might use this device to subvert, well, our expectations about what such a story will be, especially since it's based on a novel by Terry Pratchett, whose reputation as a humorist extends beyond specific knowledge of his work. To be sure, this computer-animated movie, written by Terry Rossio and directed Toby Genkel, has its charms in that regard, but it's also an effort that intrinsically stuck between two modes. On the one hand, it's very much a fairy tale aimed at children that also serves as an amusing primer about the form and conventions of telling stories. On the other, it's an increasingly dark and cynical tale about the limitations of the qualities of those stories within the context of the real world. The filmmakers never decide which approach it wants to take, and the result is a movie that's probably too grimly esoteric for kids but not nearly enough for adults. The Maurice of the title is a talking cat, voiced by Hugh Laurie—just one of many recognizable British actors providing vocal performances here. Maurice, we learn, is a con artist, traveling the countryside from village to village with a troupe of talking rats in tow. The rats, led by the mystical Dangerous Beans (voice of David Tennant), put on a big show of scurrying around town, getting into all kinds of foodstuffs, and causing general panic among plague-fearing inhabitants. That the movie opens with a musical number about rats and plague should give one an idea of the darkly jokey tone that Rossio is working toward here, although the haphazard quality of the sequence should give one a notion of how the movie isn't consistent on that front. As for Maurice's con, the cat calls in some help from his human accomplice Keith (voice of Himesh Patel) once the locals are good and terrified. Dressed as a piper like the one of legend, Keith lures the rats out of town, and the appreciative citizenry pay the pair for their efforts. Maurice wants to make enough money to live a carefree life. The rats want to earn enough to travel to a utopian island they read about in a children's book that they treat as a holy scripture, and Keith just seems content to have some company. The plot revolves around a town that appears rat-free and is undergoing a famine. Maurice wants to pull of the con anyway, but he and the team are stopped by Malicia (voice of Emilia Clarke), our first explanatory narrator who catches on to the cat's game immediately. Instead, she wants Maurice, Keith, and the rats to help her solve the mystery of the town's lack of food and the possible involvement of Boss Man (voice of David Thewlis), a slinky figure dressed in heavy layers of clothes who serves as the head of the local rat-catcher guild. The main gag for a while here is Malicia's narration breaks, which halt the proceedings to explain concepts such as a framing device (the book that rats hold dear), flashbacks (to explain how the rats became intelligent—by eating scraps from a university for magical practices), and foreshadowing. The explanations are simplistic enough to give one a sense of a quick education for kids and a brief, knowing wink for adults, but the gimmick does eventually payoff in a way with Malicia's introduction into the story proper. She's convinced she is living in a story, so Malicia tries to use her knowledge on this adventure. Unfortunately, the gimmick of that character makes for the only real flashes of distinction or personality in what's otherwise a fairly formulaic plot. The rats realize that there's a reason their non-intelligent peers have disappeared from town—and have to evade the rat-catchers, their traps, and the grisly implication of dogs viciously killing their ilk for sport. Malicia and Keith go on a quest into a dark forest to find a legendary pipe from the most famous piper, who's a demented child-murderer played for laughs in this incarnation. Such wickedly grim humor might have worked, apart from the way such twisted jokes clash with the movie's otherwise brightly cartoon-ish aesthetic, the simplicity of its story and characters, and the general feeling that more of this material is aimed at children than it isn't. As for Maurice, the cat is a bland protagonist, torn between self-preservation and wanting to help his friends. Such is the last disappointment of The Amazing Maurice, which teases so many potential ideas—about the technique of storytelling and the purpose of stories, to name a couple of obvious ones—only to fall back on something so trite. Copyright © 2023 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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(for action/peril and some rude material)
