The Spiderwick Chronicles

Oh boy. Hard to know where to begin with this one. The biggest issues were the glaring inconsistencies in logic. I know it's a kids movie, I know children aren't supposed to have the best judgment, but the errors they made just seemed ridiculous. The basic premise (beware of spoilers ahead) is that there is this book that contains all of the secrets to finding magical creatures in the world and the book is inside this old house that this mom and her three kids moves into and one of her sons finds it. The whole point is to keep the book safe from some scary ogre guy because if he had all the secrets then he would destroy the world. So the boy figures out that the house is protected by some magic something or other and the book is safe inside the house. He sees his brother get dragged away into the forest by goblins and so he goes after them, but instead of leaving the book in the magical safety of the house, he takes it with him!! I could understand this if he was going to use the book to figure out how to help his brother or something, but he doesn't open it one time! Then he finally gets his brother back safely to the house and they decide they have to go into town to find the crazy daughter of the guy who wrote the book and ask her for help, and he takes the freaking book with him again!! For NO REASON.

There was more of this kind of nonsensical BS, but it all adds up to lazy writing. It made the whole suspense of the movie kind of fall apart for me because I was so irritated. The 'feelings' part of the plot was one of the sons waiting for his father to come pick him up (the parents were recently divorced) and then of course his father doesn't show up because, surprise! He doesn't really want his son to live with him. Haven't we seen this particular drama play out about a thousand times already? Now I haven't read any of the books so I don't know if they were just stupid or very poorly adapted. Either way, I'm annoyed. From the drippy dialogue to the unbelievable plot lines, this had to be one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Don't waste your time.