By EWAN McDONALD
(Herald rating: * *)
Jim Carrey's outrageously successful heist on the box-office - How The Grinch Stole Christmas was the biggest money-earner of 2000 - persuaded producer Brian Grazer that there was money in them thar kiddies' books.
So he went out and convinced the famously protective Seuss family to
part company with the rights to dad's most famous tale, and went out to persuade another Canadian funny-man (and how often do you hear those words in the same sentence?) to suit himself up, and spend days or weeks in makeup, and filmed Mike Myers in The Cat in the Hat.
For those who are between children or grandchildren, the screenplay loosely follows the beloved Dr Seuss book: two kids, Conrad the brat (Spencer Breslin) and Sally the bossy sister (Dakota Fanning, who was absolutely marvellous in I Am Sam), and their mum, Joan Walden (Kelly Preston Travolta), a real estate agent.
The kids agree on one thing. They can't stand Mum's boy-friend, Leonard Quinn (Alec Baldwin), who is also their neighbour, and who thinks it would be a good idea if the kids went off to one of those military schools for which middle-class US seems to have a strange fascination.
When Mum is dragged back to work she has to leave the kids with a babysitter. Which is when the Cat in the Hat appears: cue Mike Myers in a cat suit and a low-rent NY, NY accent.
So what went wrong? While Seuss' morality tale works as a kids' bedtime story (believe me, it does), it's too thin to stretch into a reasonably full-length feature film plot.
There is too much smut and toilet humour for most parents' and all grandparents' taste. Myers should leave that to his "adult" movies.
There's plenty on the DVD to keep younger viewers occupied, features geared to shorter attention spans that highlight various aspects of the movie, from the music to some of the trickery involving the Cat.
* DVD, video rental 5 August
