Things Better Left Alone

Last year's film Where the Wild Things Are was a polarizing one, judging from most of the reviews of it I've seen -- critics seemed to either love it or hate it. The split opinions kept me from heading out to see it while it was in theaters, but when it arrived recently on DVD, I decided to check it out.

I am certainly glad I didn't shell out the money to see it in the theater -- I fall squarely in the "hate it" camp. I don't know if I've ever seen a 90 minute movie that felt so long. Thin on plot and thinner still on genuine sentiment, it's just a mind-numbing procession of boring mini-episodes.

Of course, it's based on the famous children's book by Maurice Sendak, which itself is only a few pages and driven entirely by the artwork. The book has little or no plot, and is just about evoking a mood. On this level, the movie is a rather faithful adaptation. It has to inject a lot of superfluous material to pad the length up to a full feature, but visually, it's a dead ringer for the book. The look of the creatures, little Max in his wolf suit with crown and king's scepter -- it's all brought to life from the pages.

But it's all book-ended by a slow-paced "real world" set-up that makes you impatient before any of those visuals actually arrive. And when they do, the novelty wears off very quickly. This all would have made a fine "short subject" film, because that's about the point where you're ready for it to end.

The characters in the film are largely unlikable; with Max himself, the script goes almost aggressively in this direction. He's a rather obnoxious little brat, which I suppose does qualify him as a "Wild Thing," but makes him a bad protagonist for a movie like this. Again, it all just works better on the pages of the original book.

Perhaps you might call it too much of a good thing. You can sit down with a young child and read the book cover to cover in just a few minutes. Watching this movie takes at least 18 times longer to do, and just isn't worth it when the best thing you can say of the movie is "it looks just like the book." I rate the movie a D-.