The Last Mimzy with Timothy Hutton
An Uninspired Trip Down the Rabbit Hole
Hollywood loves a movie that can be easily characterized. So what to make of the hard to classify movie now in dollar theaters, The Last Mimzy?
Is it a family film? A brother-sister sci-fi buddy picture? An homage to Lewis Carroll? An aborted space odyssey? ET but with time-travel? A 90-minute Intel product placement? A reworking of the 1983 Matthew Broderick movie WarGames? An Al Gore eco-tract?
In fact, it’s too much of all those things and not enough of just one or two of them.
The movie stars two young unknowns Chris O’Neil and Rhiannon Leigh Wryn as a brother and sister who discover a curious box in the tidewater on a coastal Washington island near Seattle. Inside the box the children find everyday objects… including a stuffed rabbit named Mimzy… that impart powers to the children which startle their mother (Jolie Richardson) and the boy’s teacher (Rainn Wilson).
But when Mimzy begins to talk with the little girl and the objects seem to cause a huge power blackout in the Pacific Northwest, it seems as if the children have opened up Pandora’s Box.
The power failure introduces Michael Duncan Clark as a Homeland Security agent in charge of tracking down the source of the outage, and frankly he’s just awful in this role.
And the director Robert Shaye, best known as the executive producer of the Lord of the Rings movies, has an unsteady hand at the helm.
The script is by Toby Emmerich, who also wrote the Dennis Quaid thriller Frequency, and there are echoes of Frequency in Mimzy. Emmerich is head of production at New Line Cinema, which explains how this odd little film got made.
In Frequency, Emmerich wrote a very strong role for the father (Dennis Quaid). But not this time. Timothy Hutton, a fine actor, plays the father to the kids but there’s so little for him to work with in the script he comes off rather milquetoast.
Mimzy surprised a few critics. But for me it left me feeling glad I didn’t pay full fare.
My wife probably put it best: Mimzy was more often interesting than entertaining.
The Last Mimzy is rated PG for some thematic elements, mild peril and language.
DMR grades The Last Mimzy a B.
The Dollar Movie Review Grading System: The Dollar Movie Review grades on a curve. Movies that make choices to be course or vulgar are downgraded a full to a half grade or more. Likewise, movies that don’t gross out or offend too much can be upgraded as a ‘thanks for trying’ attaboy. Because it was clean, The Last Mimzy was upgraded. Without the upgrade, I would have graded it as a B-.
