Movie Review: 'Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Here's a case where the movie is just a tad longer than the title, and there's not enough content to justify the feature length.
Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day is a strident kidflick, a slapsticky comedy for the family audience about a child who has a bad day and then gets to see what it would be like if everyone in his family also had an awful day –- the awful day -- on the same day.
Australian child actor Ed Oxenbould stars as eleven-year-old middle schooler Alexander Cooper, whose day begins with the gum that was in his mouth the night before now stuck in his hair.
Things go downhill from there, with calamities piling on calamities for Alexander, and everything that could possibly go wrong in his everyday life does just that.
His birthday wish is for his self-involved loved ones, who in his eyes seem to be living charmed lives in comparison, to go through a similar experience and thus understand what it's like for him to have a terrible, horrible day.
And then his wish appears to come true as each member of the Cooper clan -– Alexander's parents and his three siblings –- comes in for a share of temporary misfortune or mischief or misery by having a "worst day ever."
Steve Carell plays Ben, Alexander's unemployed aerospace-worker dad, with Jennifer Garner as Kelly, his distracted publishing-executive mom, and Dylan Minnette and Kerris Dorsey as his teenaged brother and sister.
And look for an unbilled Dick Van Dyke, who shows up to play himself, Megan Mullaly as Kelly's boss, and, in the film's finniest bit, Jennifer Coolidge as a diabolical driving instructor.
There's barely enough plot for a feature-length film in the award-winning 1972 Judith Viorst children's book with the same title, which is perhaps why the source book was adapted into a short animated musical special and later into a stage musical.
As the non-animated, non-musical feature version unfolds, it begins to feel as if much flavor has been lost in the translation from page to screen, and that a whole movie is being made out of what would constitute one extended sequence in another movie.
Director Miguel Arteta (Star Maps, Chuck & Buck, The Good Girl, Youth in Revolt, Cedar Rapids) keeps things kid-centric but loses the struggle to keep the stretch marks from showing in what really should be a short subject.
He works from an adapted, uninspired script by first-time screenwriter Rob Lieber that has awkwardly expanded the book's premise in the direction of halfhearted magical realism as he strings together a sufficient number of incidents and entanglements -– even if all of them occurring in the same household pushes the improbability quotient right through the ceiling -- but not so many as to test the young target audience's attention span.
Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, based on the first book in a trilogy, does at least paint a portrait of contemporary family life that is upbeat without becoming syrupy and empathetic without becoming sentimental -– until the last reel, when the film's family-values message is articulated too literally and forcefully by half.
True, this take on the material is certainly aimed directly at youngsters, but in a forced-humor way that will either tax or bore many of the parents and guardians in attendance despite the likability of Carell and Garner, who come off as gracious "good sports," which helps to smooth some of the narrative's wrinkles.
So, if the kids you're planning to accompany to AATTHNGVBD are young enough to make blandness a higher priority than creativity, it just might fit the bill.
Let's call it 2 stars out of 4. As family entertainments go, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day isn't terrible or horrible or even very bad.
But is it good? No.
