Reviews Series / A Series Of Unfortunate Events 2017

Maybe a Little Too Unfortunate

I've read the first book, watched the first movie, and now I've watched the first episode of A Series of Unfortunate Events. Previously I've criticised the film and book for not living up to its conceit. From the beginning, we have a narrator promising us how nasty the tale is going to be, but what we got was something way tamer than any Roald Dahl story. And this new series? Well, it seems to have the opposite problem.

This one is a lot more subdued this time around. There are quite a few biggish names in this one, and the likes of Neil Patrick Harris and Patrick Warburton are known for playing larger than life characters, but here they put on a far less cartoony performance. This is especially the case with our new Count Olaf, who brings none of the whimsy of Jim Carey's take, but retains all the menace. This actually made it less comfortable to watch. Jim Carey's villainous Count Olaf is a cruel, murderous cad, but he's so lively and silly it softens some of the harder edges. Harris plays a plain old mean bastard, doing mean things to kids. And that is harder to watch. It doesn't help that the first episode kind of ends without any real conclusion or resolution; it starts with some happy kids finding their parents dead, it ends with them being slapped around by their psychopathic foster parent - that isn't a particularly satisfying or entertaining thing to see. It's almost as if the story lives up to its promises of nastiness a little too well. After a certain point, I'm just not having fun watching miserable kids trying to come to terms with a miserable existence.

There are other issues as well, such as the utterly terrible and distracting CGI throughout, resembling an early 2000s videogame cutscene. If Netflix can't budget half-decent special effects, they might have been better off going full Wes Anderson, using the most janky, least convincing effects on purpose. The pace is also a little too slow too, no doubt a consequence of stretching the first book across two episodes (which explains the lack of any real resolution).

For its flaws, Unfortunate Events still has a few things I do like, such as the clever word play and steadfast conviction that adults all wind up becoming patronising, self-deluded idiots. Whilst I'll probably watch more episodes, I'm not in a hurry to do so. For all its flaws, I still find myself preferring the Jim Carey movie.