Mr Magorium’s Wonder Emporium

(2007) ★

ITV2: Saturday 19 December, 1.15pm

“This is one of my favourite stories of all time,” says Zach Mills, the nine-year-old boy narrating. If that’s not an immediate turn-off, it is also ‘supposedly a film by Zach Helm’. Or so the opening titles proclaim. Helm is the young man who wrote the whimsical Will Ferrell comedy Stranger Than Fiction. And Hollywood liked it so much they gave Helm the keys to the toyshop. Literally. Because this is Helm’s even more whimsical, school-of-Big-Fish story of a genius eccentric and his enchanted toyshop.

Dustin ‘Little Big Rain Man’ Hoffman has been there, done that. It’s just that this time he’s 243 years old and playing virtually the same character Eddie Bracken played in the old Tom Hanks hit Big, with an added dash of Willy Wonka. Natalie Portman is Mr Magorium’s awkward, piano-playing apprentice, and Mortimer is Mr Magorium’s pet zebra. It’s, you know, for kids. Which means all those colours sure are bright.

And Kermit is one of the customers. The ‘g’ in Magorium is hard, by the way, not soft like in ‘magic’. But unlike, say, Night at the Museum, this isn’t magical at all – as its tweely emphatic title suggests, you can see all the strings being pulled. Even the end titles are twee: ‘People who created things that weren’t there’, for the FX studios involved; ‘People who made the tunes’, for the musicians; ‘People who made sure we paid people’, for the accountants.

Certificate: U
Duration: 94min

IMDB – Mr Magorium’s Wonder Emporium

TMDB – Mr Magorium’s Wonder Emporium

Rotten Tomatoes – Mr Magorium’s Wonder Emporium