Five Children And It DVD > Reviews > Five Children and It's Not Very Good

Author's product rating:   

Did you enjoy it?	Indifferent to it
Story	Satisfactory
Characters / Performances	Satisfactory
Special Effects	Weak
How does it compare to similar films?	Weak

Advantages:	Wonderful vocal performance from Eddie Izzard
Disadvantages:	Irritating child performances and desperately low production values

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

During the Great War, five children are evacuated from London and sent to stay with their eccentric uncle in the country. Once there they meet a grumpy Psammead or sand fairy who is able to grant them a wish every day. Unfortunately their wishes never turn out quite as they plan, getting them into more trouble each time and then their horrible cousin Horace kidnaps the sand fairy…

Long before the likes of JK Rowling were even born, children’s fantasy was still alive and well. Victorian novelist E Nesbit (who wrote “The Railway Children”) created a magical being known as the Psammead, a sand fairy who could grant wishes. But in the tradition of the Arabian Nights, you had to be careful what you wished for; thankfully though, all the wishes lasted only until sunset, when all was put right again. Unfortunately, screenwriter David Solomons has opted to give the film version a slight update. Pushing the story forward to World War One seemed an unnecessary step. But then removing most of the children’s adventures and adding an unwarranted mad relative and a nasty fat child is unforgivable. As a result, you get a half-baked story that panders to film-goers expectations and is bereft of any sense of magic. The relentless pace destroys any sense of time passing and doesn’t allow the film’s children any time to reflect on the consequences of their actions. All of the roles are seriously underdeveloped and in some cases so poorly sketched as to render characters redundant.

The performances from the child actors range from the irritating to the invisible. Freddie Highmore, who plays lead sprog Robert has a tendency to the high pitched that may make you want to put him in a sack and throw him in the river. He isn’t helped by the fact that the screenwriter couldn’t differentiate between a troubled child and a wilfully perverse one. Robert is a thoroughly unlikeable individual whose bad behaviour makes one hope that bad luck will befall him whenever he makes a wish.

The other kids are very well-spoken and less stage school than one might expect, but so little time is spent on developing their characters that they might as well not be there. All I could glean about the characters of Anthea and Jane were that the former liked reading and the latter was a bit wet and liked fairies. The youngest child is played by twin brothers, but is rarely seen and when he is, is treated more like a prop than a person. Jonathan Bailey has a little more to do as eldest sibling Cyril, but his role is written in such a way that it lacks consistency. One minute he is telling the others to stay away from the sand fairy and not make any wishes, the next he is test-driving a sports car (or at least a middle-aged stuntman that looks nothing like him is). In light of current child obesity worries it doesn’t help that the film demonises the only fat child in the cast. Why are so many evil kids in film big-boned? It’s not a genetic certainty that because a child is heavy they will want to destroy everything and take over the world. And why give the poor kid a mullet that wouldn’t look out of place on a 1980s’ footballer?

The saving grace of this film comes in the form of the adult performers. Kenneth Branagh is marvellously over the top as Uncle Albert, both sideburned and smoking jacketed as any true eccentric should be, having his best scenes with a toy chicken, believe it or not. Zoë Wanamaker gives her sprightly best as housekeeper Martha and Tara Fitzgerald is seriously underused as the children’s mother. The most surprising and delightful turn in the whole film is the vocal performance of Eddie Izzard as the Psammead. It is a great free-wheeling, ad-libbed slice of madness that steals every scene he’s in. If you enjoyed his ramblings about cats drilling and monkeys in trees, then you’ll love his house tour for his teddy bear and his hallucinatory mutterings when faced with vivisection. It shows what Mr Izzard can do when given free reign and no requirement to do anything physical. Someone give him a cartoon to voice.

The poor quality of the films allegedly ‘special’ effects is bewilderingly low. Especially as they were provided by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, which has provided far more on a small budget previously. The Psammead looks okay and actually having something there to react to was no doubt beneficial to the child actors. However, the winged children look laughably awful and the zeppelins about as real as a polka-dotted elephant. Even the background mattes manage to look dodgy, with houses badly overlaid onto clifftops.

The costumes throughout are delightfully accurate period pieces, but only serve to remind you how little attention to detail has gone into other aspects of the production. Similarly, the score seems something of a misfire, with too much emphasis on spookiness and not enough on magic.

This is a film that looks like a low-budget children’s drama series. It lacks virtually all the elements required to make it a hit; including a decent script, child performances, attention to detail, truly special special effects and a sense of wonder. A trip to the cinema with your kids to see this would be a waste of money. You may as well wait until it’s on television seeing as you will already have paid over the odds for your TV licence to see it. It’s one that will only impress the very young or those with exceptionally low expectations. If only they’d release a five-minute version that only included Eddie Izzard’s moments of well-timed madness. (“Coming soon; the sequel “It and Five Children”…)