Mouse Hunt (1997)

reviewed by
Eric Lurio


Mouse Hunt
 Directed by
 Gore Verbinski 

Computers are making cartoons obsolete. Take Gore Verbinski's `Mouse Hunt' for instance. Could they have made a live action film using Tex Averyesque cartoon physics any other way?

No! Besides real people are far more belivable than cartoon people, a fact that isn't true for animals.

William Hickey plays the late Rudolph Smuntz, who leaves his sons Ernie(Nathan Lane) and Lars(Lee Evans) an extremely antiquated string factory (even the workers are antiques), a derelict house and a box of precastro Cuban cigars. Unfortunatly, Ernie and Lars manage to drop old dad into a sewer, and there's a whiff of a curse in the air...

The curse [which is implied, but never actually stated]works almost immediately. Lars' wife April (Vicki Lewis) immediately kicks him out of the house, the ancient box of cigars sprout cockroaches in the kitchen of Ernie's chic restaurant, killing the mayor and his business in one fell swoop, and our two heroes are homeless and friendless, but there is the old house, which turns out to be the missing work by the great 19th century architect LaRue.

This is a live-action cartoon, so the laws of physics are against them, and not only that, but a cartoon mouse in live-action drag is living there! Tom and Jerry meets Laurel and Hardy! Lane even gets the tie stchick right!

Christopher Walken is great as the exterminater the two hire get rid of the title character, and the climax is just what you'd expect...in a good way of course.


The review above was posted to the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due to ASCII to HTML conversion.

Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews