“Christmas comes whether we like it or not,” Clara’s father tells her, and she can either internalize her mother’s strength, or surrender to the anger that’s welled up in her mother’s absence. In the broadest of strokes, “The Nutcracker and the Four Realms” is the story of a girl who’s trying to fight past her grief.
NUTCRACKER FOUR REALMS REVIEWS EMBARGO MOVIE
Together, they’ll have to fight a giant mouse that’s made up of thousands of tiny mice, and dispatch Mother Ginger’s phalanx of menacing jesters if this movie has any chance of sticking with young viewers, it’s only because these bouncing terrors might scar them for life. That tasks falls to Clara, who’s accompanied by a life-sized Nutcracker soldier (appropriately stiff newcomer Jayden Fowora-Knight, stuck under a leaden script). Okay, technically it may be called something else, but the gist of it is that it’s a barren wasteland that’s at war with the other realms, and a place that will remain a threat to the other lands until the sinister Mother Ginger (Helen Mirren, because why not) is vanquished once and for all. But what about the fourth realm, you ask? Well, that’s the Land of Nightmare-Inducing Clowns.
One of the four realms of legend, in fact! What’s that? You don’t know about the realms? Well, there are four of them, three of which seem like Wonka-esque paradises: The Land of Snowflakes, the Land of Flowers, and the Land of Sweets, the last of which is presided over by a human cavity known as the Sugar Plum Fairy ( Keira Knightley, fun enough in a performance that suggests Helena Bonham Carter being mummified in pink cotton candy). Clara also siblings, but they don’t matter.Īnyway, our heroine attends a massive ball thrown by her fairy godfather (a steampunk Morgan Freeman, wearing an eyepatch and sporting an owl on his shoulder), and - in search of a key that might open a mechanical egg her mother left behind - wanders into a mystical realm. Her father (Matthew Macfadyen) is likewise paralyzed with grief, though he tends to express it through some vaguely incestuous moments straight out of “Vertigo.” Loss is a messy business, and so there’s no sense judging the guy for the look on his face when Clara shows up in his dead wife’s dress, but perhaps it would have helped to give the character another facet or motivation beyond really wanting to dance with his daughter at the evening’s big soiree. Despite Foy’s best efforts, it’s clear immediately that Clara is yet another of the standard-issue YA protagonists that can suck the life right out of a movie like this: She’s brilliant (a trait that she inherited from her late mother), she’s boring, and she’s bereft of a parent. In a festive mansion that seems as though it were built from the remnants of the house in “Fanny & Alexander,” a young girl named Clara (“Interstellar” breakout Mackenzie Foy) hides away in the attic, tinkering on her latest Rube Goldberg machine. Screenwriters Tom McCarthy and Ashleigh Powell keep the holiday spirit to a minimum, but it’s no surprise that the story begins on Christmas Eve. Hoffman’s “The Nutcracker and The Mouse King” - or even a movie that’s merely “suggested by” it - Christmas will always be the pervasive inspiration of them all. If the premise suggests a less ambitious riff on “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” the candied aesthetic reeks of a less hostile and hideous take on Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland.” Of course, when it comes to any adaptation of E.T.A. It’s a chore to sit through now, and in all likelihood it will be a chore to sit through always.įor a movie with so much stuff to look at, the only things you really see during “The Nutcracker and the Four Realms” are all of the recent movies that it’s flagrantly trying to recycle. And yet, here we have an uninspired screensaver of a movie that fails to offer children interesting characters to care about/see themselves in, a coherent plot to follow, or even the faintest trace of humanity under its $130 million husk of gorgeous sets and garish special effects. It’s never a good sign when the best scene in a ludicrously expensive, blockbuster reimagining of “The Nutcracker” is… the part where the movie pauses for a simple dance sequence, complete with practical sets (with visible wheels!) and a show-stopping cameo from ballerina Misty Copeland. ‘Bucky F*cking Dent’ Review: David Duchovny Adds a Wistful New Chapter to the Baseball Movie Canon
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