THE BORROWERS (47)

Directed by: Peter Hewitt

Starring: John Goodman, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Laurie

The Pitch: A boy finds a family of "Borrowers" - tiny people who live by "borrowing" things from us (all the things we think we've lost) - living in his house.

Theo Sez: Amiable kidstuff but it over-reaches, trying both to preserve the old-fashioned charm of the original children's books, with their cosy village setting and genteel puns (like the Borrowers living in fear of us "human beans"), and to deal in the cruder, flashier currency of today's kidpics, featuring a surfeit of special effects and a (totally gratuitous) farting dog. The result is the kind of muddle that has the Borrowers speaking in English accents but saying things like "Listen up" and "I'm calling the shots", and the kind of film where everyone was apparently too distracted by what they were trying to do to concentrate on what they were actually doing : some of the plotting is atrociously lazy (why does Goodman go to such lengths to uncover the very document that incriminates him, especially since no-one else knows it exists? why does he call in an exterminator when the house is due to be demolished in a few hours?), a reflection of the film's contempt for its juvenile audience. Still, there's enough nicely quirky moments - a chase in a milk-bottling plant, Laurie as a pedantic village cop musing that "courtesy is the glue that holds Society together" - to make it pleasurable, and the idea of miniature families tucked away in the crevices of our homes has a certain irresistible gemutlichkeit to it ; significantly, when - in the film's climax - thousands of Borrowers suddenly emerge from the woodwork, it all feels somehow a lot less special.