Movie Review - 'Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium'

Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium

Starring Dustin Hoffman, Natalie Portman and Jason Bateman
Directed by Zach Helm
Rated G

The title Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium tells you a thing or two about the movie you’re about to see. Unlike Michael Clayton, a title that rivals an address label for creativity, the words Wonder Emporium imply that magic and pixie dust and possibly stuffed animals or household objects that come to life fill the scenes, and that the desired response is that you leave your logic at the door and marvel at the sights and sounds.

Tack on the name Mr. Magorium and, well, there’s no limit to the fun you can have.

The only problem is that the title is not just the most creative element of this lame brained fairy tale but it’s also misleading; there’s very little wonder in this emporium, other than the head scratching at how such a self-absorbed and moronic movie targeted at families ever got made.

Magorium (Dustin Hoffman) is a 243-year-old toy shop owner who decides the time has come to slip into his eternal slumber. He’s not sick, merely out of shoes. Magorium wants to bequeath the store and its magic toys to his store manager, Mahoney (Natalie Portman), only, much like the kids in Peter Pan, she doesn’t believe the magic is real until she has to.

This may be the absolute worst performance of Dustin Hoffman’s career. He flits about with a lisp and high hair hoping that it will be endearing, but it instead makes you question how an actor this skilled has instincts this bad.

Portman is dreadful without being disastrous, but then again, she’s not playing a goofy 243-year-old magician. She’s been as good in some roles as she has been bad in others, which generally means you can chalk it up to an absolute trust in her directors to guide the character. In this case, it’s Zach Helm, who is a rookie in that role but wrote the extremely clever script for Stranger than Fiction.

In addition to performances that defy explanation, there’s a broader problem with the storytelling. There’s no real hook – nothing to draw you in—other than a glib assumption by Helm that you’ll follow the story because it’s a fairy tale, and the scenery doesn’t change much as the movie trudges along.

Flights of fancy fall into one of two categories; they can either be great or they can be awful. The only thing great about Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium is the amount of awful it can fit into 90 minutes.