PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 12/16/04)

There's a certain genius to the Lemony Snicket books (ghost written by a profoundly funny man named Daniel Handler) that eludes even the great J.K. Rowling, whose imagination and storytelling prowess exceed Handler's, but who wasn't clever enough to anticipate his brilliant marketing ploy: The Lemony Snicket series implores young readers "interested in stories with happy endings" to look elsewhere, confident that the junior sadists will cave in to their burgeoning schadenfreude, an awfully big word which here means "pleasure derived from the misfortune of others."

Of course, the books belong to a great tradition of children's literature in which misunderstanding and misfortune befall the pure of heart. From Dickens to Rowling, Edward Gorey to the Brothers Grimm (and let's not forget a personal favorite: Louis Sachar's Holes), urchins of all ages have long endured cruel-world hardships for the satisfaction of the masses. The more they suffer, the greater the reader's pleasure, for what child cannot identify with the plight of other kids in pain?

The key, it seems, is finding a sufficiently droll narrator, and while Jude Law is a great many things (the sexiest man alive, some would say), one thing he most decidedly is not is the proper person to conduct audiences through this miserable minefield of a story. As any devotee of the series can tell you, tone is everything, and Law's regret-tinged whispers send this yarn spinning into the empathetic quagmire of smug child psychologists and smothering kindergarten teachers (consider the challenge Peter Falk faced in narrating the best bedtime story ever told, The Princess Bride).

Luckily, virtually everyone else is a better match for their literary counterparts. The kids who play the Baudelaire orphans (brainy Violet, bookish Klaus, and bitey Sunny) are dead ringers, the adults appropriately daffy, and Jim Carrey exactly the kind of over-the-top show-stealer you'd expect as Count Olaf (can an actor be too right for a part?). Meryl Streep is amusing as frantic Aunt Josephine, although under more fortunate circumstances, the movie would probably have ended by the time she enters the picture.

Adapted from the first three Lemony Snicket books, the film feels episodic and overlong, and yet, you want to get lost in its world, exploring everything from the cobwebbed corners of Count Olaf's mansion to the far shores of Lake Lachrymose. Events is an astounding achievement in production design, an original creation so completely in tune with the books' macabre sensibilities that even the movie's (arguably) happy ending can't diminish its satisfying sense of schadenfreude.

—Peter Debruge