By Paul Byrnes
FOUR KIDS AND IT ★★
PG, 110 minutes
There’s an old saying, credited to French playwright Jean Giraudoux, that Hollywood wishes it had come up with. "The secret of success is sincerity - once you can fake that, you’ve got it made."
That goes double in films for children, where standards of sincerity are often lower than the proverbial snake’s duodenum.
Having Russell Brand as an eccentric laird can’t have been plain-sailing.
Four Kids and It is an adaptation of an adaptation of a classic book from 1902. Edith Nesbit’s Five Children and It was the story of some children who discovered a grumpy sand-fairy in a gravel pit in Kent. The "Psammead" was able to grant wishes, but only one per day, and it would expire at sunset. The children learned making good choices was not so easy.
Nesbit also wrote The Railway Children, but Five Children… was three years earlier, and a phenomenal success. There have been adaptations galore for stage and screen, the most recent film version being in 2004. In 2012, the prolific children’s author Jacqueline Wilson updated the original book for our times, as Four Kids and It.
Sir Michael Caine voices the grumpy sand-fairy, Psammead.
The fifth child, a baby in a pram, didn’t make the cut; the other four were from divorced families, brought together by a new romance. They found the Psammead in a woodland in Surrey, but the moral was the same: be careful what you wish for.
This new movie is based on Wilson’s book, but changes many of the details for no gain. The setting is a holiday house on the beautiful Cornish coast, but none of the kids wants to be there. Ros (Teddie Malleson-Allen) and her little brother Robbie (Billy Jenkins) are still smarting over their parents' separation.
The father David (Matthew Goode) tricks them into a holiday in the countryside with promises of a "surprise". Ros thinks her mother may be joining them; instead, it’s her father’s new girlfriend Alice (Paula Patton), and her two daughters. Smash (Ashley Aufderheide) is about 13, same as Ros, but a higher grade of trouble – she has an angry attitude and a penchant for mischief. Her little sister Maudie (Ellie-Mae Siame) is sweet as sunshine, like Robbie, but the two teenage girls hate each other on sight.
The movie’s best idea was to cast Michael Caine as the voice of the Psammead. He all but makes up for the lack of budget for effects. Caine can make anything sound sincere - especially when he is playing a grumpy Englishman who’s several million years old. The kids find him on a secret beach - a small raggedy sand creature who likes shiny things – a sort of Cockney ET. Caine’s delivery saves the film from becoming a complete disaster.
The problem boils down to this question of sincerity. Director Anthony de Emmony does not feel the magic of this story. He sees a quick and dirty children’s movie made in a pretty location with agreeable casting - although having Russell Brand as an eccentric laird can’t have been plain-sailing. None of the performers is at ease, except Michael Caine – and he probably did his bit in a recording studio on the other side of the planet.
The children’s performances are chronically uneven, so there is no bedrock of reality supporting the story. Without that structure, and with no credible response to the magical presence of the sand monster, the movie never achieves a hint of self-belief. It’s more like a bad pantomime, with Russell Brand as the hiss-worthy villain. Paula Patton and Matthew Goode sleep walk through their roles. I’ve seen more chemistry in a green pond.
Part of this is pure laziness, the idea standards can be lower in a movie for kids. No-one cared enough to try to counter that. Admittedly, this is low-budget, but that’s not the problem. It’s the dispiriting low expectations of it, the acceptance that it will be "good enough for the kiddies". Producers who think that still holds true are delusional: the technical standards of mainstream movies for children have never been higher. Kids will spot the insincerity a mile off and punish it at the box office, which is no more than the film deserves.