This film involving talking rodents within an Early Renaissance story takes a lot of risks with its story telling and content. On the outside it looks like it’s a fun fairy-tale filled adventure and courage. On the inside it disappoints. Despereaux (Matthew Broderick) is the lead protagonist with large floppy ears who goes out to show his courage among humans, but does not have a strong presence in the film. In fact, he shares screen time with Roscuro (Dustin Hoffman) who has an opposite story that doesn’t have much drive either. Their stories don’t have much to do with each other, and their paths cross in a way that’s done forcefully. It’s poorly paced, boring, and baited me towards one direction, but would stop abruptly. It drove me crazy! There are also multiple minor characters what were forced into the film for variety. It felt like I was watching two movies that were fighting for screen time. After I watched it, I found out that the film had two directors: Sam Fell and Robert Stevenhagen. It finally made sense.
It’s very difficult to get a two-director project to work well. There are two leaders, two creative minds, and two decision makers. From what I saw in “The Tale of Despereaux”, these two directors couldn’t make up their mind about what (or who) to cut or edit out and just put whatever made the other happy. This makes for a poorly paced and confusing film. Ethan and Joel Coen come to mind when two directors work well for a film. They have coordination and creative thinking giving them “grit” when they make their films such as “Fargo” (1996) and “No Country for Old Men” (2007). They’re not afraid to say “no” to each other. Something that “The Tale of Despereaux” could have used. This was a bit of a negative review. I hope I see some better movies soon. It’ll be good for me.
The Tale of Despereaux
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