德国as50狙击步枪图片:《雷蒙·斯尼奇的不幸历险》(Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Event)的英文影评

In Brief: Welcome to the wicked world of Lemony Snicket, free of a troublesome happy ending and devoid of any sort of joy. It's a world where one bad thing happens after another, a veritable series of unfortunate events. And it's wonderfully executed, brilliantly cast and almost perfectly Potter-beating. If only it weren't for Jim Carrey...

In Full: With The Lord of The Rings now officially a part of cinematic history with the release of the final Extended Edition last week, and the next instalment of Harry Potter still warning of wet paint on its sets at Leavesden, there's a definite gap in the market for some good, solid fantasy on the big screen. And this is the candidate to fill the post - the first cinematic adaptation of Daniel Handler's prolific Lemony Snicket books (Snicket is Handler's pen-name).

The similarities, particularly with the Potter franchise, are hard to miss, although the story does its best to innovate: A series of books (eleven currently in print and thirteen in total - this film condenses the first three) tells of the adventures of the Baudelaire orphans, Klaus (a reader), Violet (an inventor), and Sunny (a biter), following the death of their parents in a fire at the family home. They find themselves plunged into a world they cannot control under the guardianship of a wicked relative who'd like nothing better than to tap into the hideous fortune their parents have left them.

But unlike those Fantasy stalwarts of recent years, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Event doesn't serve its treats easily. First off, there is no happy ending here but rather, as the title implies, simply a final unfortunate event. And, perhaps more importantly, there's Jim Carrey.

Distracting from everything that's good about this film and its source material, Carrey is Count Olaf, a devilishly wicked method-acting cousin of the Baudelaire orphans. Simply a nasty and horrible man in the books, Carrey perverts the character into his own comedic vision, delivering Ace Ventura with sillier hair or The Cable Guy without a lisp, depending on your persuasion. The man is given too much freedom to ad-lib and succeeds in removing any trace of danger from the character. The job of the orphans in escaping their tormentor is motivated here by annoyance, surely, for there is nothing threatening about Carrey's Olaf.

Carrey's character is, frustratingly, the crux of the film and, whether we like it or not, he turns up to spoil every episodic incident the film plays out. Liam Aiken and Emily Browning do fine jobs as the verbal Baudelaire orphans, Klaus and Violent, and baby Sunny's subtitled gurgles are hilariously funny when they aren't wallowing in cliché, but they're not trusted with the weight of the film and so the script is given over to Carrey as often as possible.

But the real genius is in Handler's stories and Robert Gordon's screenplay and Carrey relies on neither to craft his Olaf. He is the only distraction of an otherwise brilliant film.

But Carrey isn't representative of the rest of the adult cast. Billy Connoly never really works when he's given a script, but Meryl Streep is simply wonderful. As the Baudelaire's nervous and gun-shy Aunt Josephine, Streep brings the script to life and is given the funniest line of the piece. Her fear of realtors (a word which here means "estate agents" - you'll do well to keep that little Americanism in mind when you watch) is executed delightfully well and will leave you crying with laughter.

This film's real strength, though, is in its stylistic precision. Incredibly Burtonesque, the visuals are powerful enough to secure the film a spot high on the fantasy league tables, everything is so brilliantly other-worldly that there's a spirit to the film that not even Jim Carrey can touch.

In spite of Carrey (yes, in spite of), Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events has the comedic edge on its JK Rowling cousin, and has the weight and smarts to become this Christmas' big movie. It's Carrey's involvement that, very nearly, lets the entire film down, but do your best to look past him and you won't go far wrong. One thing's for sure: you could do much, much worse than Lemony Snicket this Christmas.