Directed by Gore Verbinski
Running time 98 mins
Certificate PG
I don't care what anyone says: I know that I can tell you, word for word, what the pitch to Dreamworks for this, their first kids film, was like. "Get this, Steven: It's Laurel and Hardy meets Tom and Jerry, right? But get this: it's live action!".
If the old stories about the concept pitch are true, that's how you would sell Mousehunt to a studio. You wouldn't tell them what they'd actually be getting, as it would probably be too weird and way out for it to ever be greenlighted. Because who would have thought that what the world has been waiting for, all these years, was a film that runs like Tim Burton's Home Alone.
This is a live-action cartoon, using all the same gags and all the same shticks that made the mighty creative forces of Termite Terrace such sources of legend. Of course, live action cartoons have been tried before, but they're generally a catastrophe: the less said about the live-action Flintstones and Popeye, the better for all concerned. Live action films that just try to steal the humor from cartoons have always been abject failures. The best (or worst, depending on your view point) is Cactus Jack a poor comedy western in which Jack Palance proved that he made a lousy Wile E. Coyote and Arnold Schwarzeneggar an even worse Road Runner. Before anyone raises the point, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? doesn't count, as it was about cartoons, rather than being a cartoon and therefore different. If you don't believe me, I'll be forced to raise the specter of the truly rotten Cool World and then it will all just get really messy.
Yet Mousehunt is a successful live action cartoon. Quite possibly the reason that it's the first of its kind to pass muster is that the technology of film making is sufficiently advanced that an artificial mouse can now lay traps for a cat and then look knowingly into the camera without just looking like a lint ball on strings. Now a CGI and model mouse can run, walk, jump and squeak as convincingly as is required by the director. Now you can have the old "hose in one end of a mouse hole will fill up all the walls with water" gag and actually make it believable. Or maybe it's that Mousehunt a genuinely, effects aside for one moment, funny.
Sure, the jokes are old and well-worn, but that's why they're classics. There probably hasn't been a new gag in cartoons in fifty years, beyond subtle elaborations and minor self- referential tweaks, but that doesn't stop them being bone-funny. As the Smuntz brothers, heirs to a failing string business and a priceless but derelict old house, Nathan Lane and Lee Evans now the value of a great sight gag and realize, more importantly, that great sight gags are built on pomposity and stupidity. As a result, many people will say "oh, they're just doing Laurel and Hardy routines". After all, we have the master of fey affectation, Nathan Lane, better known as the 'wife' from The Birdcage and latter-day Norman Wisden clone Evans playing the fat, smug, mustachioed pompous ass and the well-intentioned but perilously dim thin sidekick respectively. One can almost see them performing The Piano Movers, so accurately do they fit the mould. However, it's not like they don't appreciate the similarities: check out Lane's little wave with his tie to the two attractive young ladies, an obvious and intentional homage to Ollie. However, what has to be remembered is that Stan and Ollie didn't invent the routine: after all, putting a fat guy and a thin guy together is always funny. No-one knows why, it just is. Laurel and Hardy knew it, Shakespeare knew it, as Toby Belch and sir Andrew Aguecheek prove and now Evans and Lane know it as well. Like the old jokes, it's an old comic truth and open to use and abuse by everyone. The only question to be asked is how well do they tell the same old jokes?
Well, quite frankly, I haven't laughed this much at a movie since the first time I saw Animal House. Dark, bold, fearsome and fearless, Mousehunt is rich enough in light tortures and heavy enough with cutesy sight gags to keep kids and adults respectively enthralled. After all, kids love to see people get a frying pan in the face: it's the root of comedy. Adults wuss out and develop a taste for witty badinage, rather than falling down a flight of stairs. Actually, truth be told, adults want to claim that they look for wit rather than slapstick, but they only really have kids so that they can justify getting the Cartoon Network. So the fact that the opening ten minutes involve a flying, trouserless corpse, an explosion in a string factory and a major dignitary finding half a cockroach in his dinner means that everybody is going to love this movie.
Mousehunt takes the basic gag underlying much Warners cartoon humor as its starting point: that is, the idea of wrecking your house just to get some peace. The Smuntz brothers are on the way down, personally and financially, when they discover that their father has left them an architecturally significant house. Their response to this generous gift? Fix it up, flog it, take the money and run.
There's only one problem: the house has a resident already. A tiny, weeny, wee mouse. So what's the problem?
Well the problem is that this particular mouse is beyond merely cunning. It's quite possibly the devil with paws. Traps don't work, cats don't work, pest control officers don't work. Well, don't work is a bit of an understatement. Traps are set on the people who laid them in the first place, cats end up in the cellar and as for the pest control officer... well, it's not a pretty thought. The mouse wants to stay. The Smuntz boys don't stand a chance.
Another rule of cartoons is that audiences love the underdog. Just like Tom And Jerry, Mousehunt realizes that, although Tom may normally start all of this, he gets his just desserts and more. After a while, the audience has to feel for them and this calls upon Lane and Evans not merely to be hapless but endearing, which they manage without ever becoming schmaltzy. As they become increasingly outgunned, the audience is drawn into their "where's the next pie in the face coming from" plight and can't help laughing along uproariously when it does finally appear.
The joy of this movie is that every gag escalates, stepping up the insanity one additional measure of insanity: this does mean saving the best for last, where the inevitable result of trying to flush the wallspace out with a hose comes to pass. Yeah, that gag, I know, but it's a doozy.
There is, en route, a minor diversion, as attention shifts from the Smuntz brothers to the remarkable Christopher Walken as a quite insane pest control officer, who comes across as Colonel Kurtz's discharged brother. American fictional bug killers, from John Goodman in Arachnophobia, via Bill Lee in Naked Lunch and straight to Dale Gribble of King Of The Hill notoriety, have always been quite, quite insane. Possibly it's something to do with the toxins, but Walken, displaying one of his rarely displayed bursts of comic sensitivity. If you loved the way in which he virtually exploded the words "that uncomfortable hunk of metal" in Pulp Fiction, you'll love this.
But, then again, what's not to love here? This film is, for what it does, near divine. It tells the old gags well, it makes you laugh, it's spooky and exhilarating and predictable and everything that the world needs from a cartoon. Score another success from Dreamworks.
RMW