This film version of the books comes to the screen as a clear attempt by another studio (two studios in fact, a co-production between DreamWorks and Paramount) to find another children’s franchise along the lines of the runaway success of the Harry Potter movies. A Series of Unfortunate Events was first announced in 2000 and passed through the hands of several directors including Harry Potter director Chris Columbus and Barry Sonnenfeld of The Addams Family (1991) and Men in Black (1997) fame (who retains an executive producer role), before coming to rest in the hands of Brad Silberling. Silberling is a director who has mostly worked in tv and has hazarded out onto cinema screens before with two uneven ventures into fantasy – the comic-book character adaptation Casper (1995) and the bland angel romance City of Angels (1998), as well as one non-fantastic melodrama Moonlight Mile (2002) and the dismal big-screen remake of Land of the Lost (2009). The screenplay, which comes after a treatment by Daniel Handler was rejected, is from Robert Gordon who has one promising credit under his belt – the hilarious GalaxyQuest (1999) – and one bad strike – Sonnenfeld’s Men in Black II (2002).

The production designers have created a magnificently baroque world – sort of like a Dickensian fantasy that might have been invaded by the Addams Family. Much comparison can be made to the eccentrically akilter worlds created by Tim Burton in films like Edward Scissorhands (1990), The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and Corpse Bride (2005). The filmmakers seem conscious of this and have brought on board as production designer Rick Heinrichs, whose hand in the various capacities of production designer, art director, visual consultant and producer has been on every Burton film. Although the real source of inspiration to both Burton and Daniel Handler has been the Gothic illustrations and dark fables of children’s writer Edward Gorey. The illustrations that accompany the Lemony Snicket books, which have been faithfully recreated by Rick Heinrichs, most certainly source Gorey. Heinrichs creates a wonderfully Gothic rococo world for the film – from the clock tower where the silhouette of Lemony Snicket feverishly writes surrounded by whirling cogs; to Meryl Streep’s rickety shack perched on stilts on the edge of a clifftop; to the rustic magpie’s nest of Count Olaf’s suburban castle. And all colour has been bled out of the frame to create a world that takes place in duns and stark black and whites. All of this forms a perfect counterpoint to the wilfully miserable and unhappy story that Daniel Handler tells in the books.

Alas almost all of A Series of Unfortunate Events’s creative energy seems to have been spent by the production design team and been spread thinly elsewhere. The screenplay encompasses no less than Daniel Handler’s first three books – The Bad Beginning (1999), The Reptile Room (1999) and The Wide Window (1999) – and has condensed them down into one somewhat episodic story. Despite this though, the actual story still manages to seem rather slight. Indeed while the film assembles a magnificently baroque world and populates it with a hissably skulking storybook villain with a penchant for extravagant disguises and who exudes lots of menace, not much happens dramatically during the film.

Indeed while the titular Lemony Snicket is constantly interrupting the narrative to warn the audience how horrible things are about to happen and how miserable the children are, there is precious little in the film that ever is horrible or threatening. Contrast this to Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas or Beetlejuice (1988), ostensibly children’s films that also had a dark (albeit arch) bite not far beneath, or the minatory menace of Dahl’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) – by contrast Lemony Snicket seems almost anodyne. There are various set-pieces with the children facing killer leeches, a collapsing house, having to climb a clock tower to save the baby and most successfully the scene where Count Olaf abandons them on the train track, but none of these really raise one’s pulse anywhat. You sort of come out of the film feeling that you should have cared more, that you should have been on a seat-edge or laughing at the mock dramatic thrills. But instead you end up feeling that the film never quite got started.

Part of the problem here is that the plot feels unfinished. There’s mention made in Lemony Snicket’s introduction about secret societies but clearly anything to do with these was cut from the film; there’s clearly also meant to be something of significance regarding the spyglasses; while the cause of the parents’ death is never explained. These mysteries was left open-ended in the books, but the feeling here is of a story that is frustratingly incomplete rather than any sense that one wants to return to the series and find the answers in subsequent episodes.

About the only other thing that Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events has propelling it along is an unrestrained Jim Carrey. Since about 1998, Jim Carrey has been trying to perfect his serious acting mode, which has not always been a particularly pretty sight to behold. Count Olaf is Carrey’s first chance to return to the kind of completely over-the-top acting that he first found fame with and Lemony Snicket his first film back in this vein since about Me, Myself & Irene (2000). Carrey really lets go and graces the show with his characteristically rafter-rattling histrionics. All of this is dependent on whether one likes Jim Carrey’s excesses – I admit to being in the camp that finds him an intense irritation. Perhaps in the most telling line, the film has Emily Browning tell him: “You’re a terrible actor.” The children, Emily Browning and Liam Aiken, by contrast give quite sweet and appealing performances and are perfectly cast in their parts. The other big name of the show, Meryl Streep, is under-utilized. Brad Silberling rarely gives Streep much of an opportunity to flourish and it’s a rather forgettable role, even more so for an actress of Meryl Streep’s estimable stature.

(Nominee for Best Production Design at this site’s Best of 2004 Awards. No. 10 on the SF, Horror & Fantasy Box-Office Top 10 of 2004 list).