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French filmmaker Besson is best known for his high-concept action/sci-fi thrillers, like The Transporter, The Professional and The Fifth Element, but here, he turns his attention to entertaining the littlies with a computer generated kiddie orgasm in the vein of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and The Ant Bully.
Arthur (Freddie Highmore from Finding Neverland)
is taken - he, of course, has to be transformed into a nail-sized CGI
character first - to the land of the Minimoys, a tiny people living in
harmony with nature.
There’s enough here to hold the kiddies’
attention, but those looking for something as exciting as seeing Jason
Statham outrunning Porsche’s on a Florida highway or watching Milla
Jovovich doing a back-flip toward Bruce Willis’s carrier region, might
like to invest their time in something a little better structured.
The
problem with this one isn’t that it’s story isn’t appealing or that the
effects aren’t good-looking - they are - but more so the fact that the
screenplay and director (or one or the other) let everything else down.
Though the film itself is based on an already-established book,
Besson’s film suggests that his motivation here is to merely rob the
best parts from other kids movies and stitch them together. In turn, it
all comes across a bit messy… and even the kids might be scratching
their heads by the 60-minute-mark (considering it runs for over two
hours, that’s a worse predicament than it sounds).
EXTRAS
DVD extras include a 7-minute ‘Voices of Arthur and the Invisibles’
segment that merely reminds viewers that Besson was able to rope in the
likes of David Bowie, Madonna and Snoop Dogg to provide voices in the
film, a couple of music videos and a fan-made trailer (there was a
competition to come up with a trailer for the film). Conclusion:
Movie 60% Extras: 50%
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