By Kenneth Collins,Edward Little High School

This is the story of the three Bauedelaires, Violet (Emily Browning), the eldest Bauedelaire who likes to invent machines to help around the house; Klaus (Liam Aiken), who is absolutely obsessed with reading books; and then there’s Sunny, the littlest Bauedelaire who mainly likes to bite various objects and speak in a baby language that her much older brother and sister can understand. The Bauedelaires go on an epic adventure to find happiness and a peaceful guardian and try to cope with the horribly unlucky event that has befallen them.

As the film begins, you see the three Bauedelaire’s hanging out at the ocean on a very glum evening. As the Bauedelaires continue what they’re doing, a mysterious fat man appears from the dark hazy mist the ocean has produced. The mysterious man’s name is Mr. Poe who tells the Bauedelaires some news that will change their lives forever

The Bauedelaire children, now the Bauedelaire orphans, are devastated to hear that both of their parents have died in an enormous fire that burned down the whole Bauedelaire mansion. At first the reaction of the children is to do nothing but stand blankly looking at Mr. Poe wondering if he is playing a sick joke on them, But he isn’t, this is all real.

Mr. Poe has the children reside with their closest relative whom they’ve never met, Count Olaf (Jim Carrey). As the children arrive, they notice the gloomy darkened state his house is in and are a little bit sketchy about entering the haunted house. Mr. Poe knocks on the door and a tall man with milky white hair sticking out from the back appears. When Mr. Poe leaves to go back to work, Count Olaf starts to get mean and makes the children do everything he says so he can get his hands on the Bauedelaire fortune.

Will they survive the clutches of Count Olaf or will he get the large Bauedelaire fortune that he has always wanted?

This film covers the first three books in “Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events,” “The Bad Beginning,” ” The Reptile Room” and ” The Wide Window”. Putting three great books into one two hour movie sounds like a good thing, but it’s not. You can miss most of the things that happen in the books that aren’t in the movie or some major details or different characters that are in the book and not in the film.

The acting by Jim Carrey was humorous because though this movie was supposed to be glum and dank, Jim Carrey provides a little chuckle every time he pops up in the film.

Like I said before, not a lot of things were in the movie that were in the books, some being Count Olaf’s henchmen and how they shortened a two hundred page book and brought it down to fill a time slot of ten minutes. Another thing they shortened up was the boat ride that takes place in ” The Wide Window.” The boat ride in the movie seemed like a little kid could do it because the water is calm but, in the book the children sail across the lake in the middle of the dangerous Hurricane Herman. One thing that also bothered me was that they split the first book in half by putting the first half of it in the beginning and the second half at the end. I mean what’s up with that – shouldn’t they leave books the way they were written? The last thing that bothered me was that a character who played a moderately big role in the first book only showed up twice in the film and only said a couple words to boot. Her name is Justice Strauss and the children found most of the answers on what Count Olaf was doing in her law theme library. It mentioned once that she was a lawyer,that was at the end also.

This movie (I think) had a great mix of dark glum enviroments and humor coming from the kids and Jim Carrey but it also degraded the books, and if I first saw the movie and never heard of the books, I don’t think I would want to read them. If your planning on going to see this movie you should read the books first then the movie would seem a lot better, because you wouldn’t get most of the things that were in the movie if you’ve never read the books.

All in all this movie was good but not as great as I hoped it to be.

OVERALL B-

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