I'm not buying a ticket

Rating: 2/10 (31 December 2005)

Here's the problem with many feature length kid's films - they take up 90 minutes or so when they only have at best an hour's worth of material (see Finding Nemo). But instead of resulting in filler material, here the problem infects the entire movie, with everything that happens dragged out to an absurd degree. I mean, really, how many times can we see kids reaching for something fluttering maddeningly just out of reach? And how many times can we see something waft unpredictably for two or three minutes before lighting just where it should be? During editing didn't anyone say, hey, we already did that twice? I have to admit, I didn't hang around to the end (the Hanks character was bizarre and the North Pole looked pretty strange to me). My 4 year old who loves both trains and Christmas had checked out long ago. For once he had better judgment than me.