Martin Short provides the voice of Thimbletack, a honey-loving house brownie who turns green and bulbous when angered, and there's a piggy hobgoblin who speaks with the frathouse swagger of Seth Rogen. Yes, faeries are real - and brownies and boggarts and sylphs and goblins - and "Spiderwick Chronicles" visualizes them all with duly detailed digitized wonder. Jared is bitter - he doesn't know that dad (a briefly glimpsed Andrew McCarthy) is a cheating rat - and he sulks his way into a hidden study where ancestor Arthur Spiderwick (Strathairn) carried out his studies on the faerie realm. On those acres stands a creepy old house, and into that house move the Graces: newly separated mom (Parker), twins Jared (Highmore) and Simon (Highmore), and teenage daughter Mallory (Sarah Bolger, one of the sisters in "In America"). Produced by Nickelodeon and based on a popular book series by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black, "Spiderwick" occupies a niche between one of the lower-rent Walden Media young-adult-lit adaptations and "The Chronicles of Narnia" - it's "The Golden Compass" shrunk down to the size of a few cubic acres. And why shouldn't they? The movie's tweenage target audience has no idea who they are.įreddie Highmore gets to play twins, though, and that's something. Mary-Louise Parker, David Strathairn, Nick Nolte, Dame Joan Plowright - Laurence Olivier's widow, for Pete's sake - all rattle around this noisy action-fantasy contraption looking vaguely stunned. ![]() The lasting mystery of "The Spiderwick Chronicles" is why the producers cast actors known for rising to a creative challenge - and then gave them so little to do.
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