Film Review: "The House With A Clock In Its Wall" Is As Imaginative As Its Title
The House With a Clock In Its Wall doesn’t even qualify as movie fast-food. It’s more like a lump of crusty dough slathered in movie-flavoured sauces. The only thing it has going for it is its fun, PG gore, which is indeed a pleasant throwback to those 80s movies where the wall separating horror and adventure was porous (think Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom). But even that effect is dulled by some astoundingly indifferent direction from well-known horror movie director Eli Roth.
Roth also stifles the combined talents of Cate Blanchett and Jack Black, both starring here as warlocks mentoring a young boy with a keen interest in magic, making the movie that much tougher to sit through. Watching them desperately try to inject some heat and zest into their room-temperature, exposition-heavy scenes quickly becomes sad and tiresome. At a certain point, you’re just watching actors you want to like flail around helplessly in costumes which were seemingly designed by an enthusiastic high-school theatre kid. For a movie budgeted at 40 million dollars, that sure as hell is not a compliment.
Adapted from the 1973 children’s book of the same name, the story centres on a recently orphaned ten-year-old boy named Lewis (Owen Vaccaro), who’s sent to live with his warlock uncle (Jack Black). His witch neighbour (Cate Blanchett) also gets in on the fun. Said fun involves dusty old theme park ride-grade ‘thrills’ such as secret rooms filled with dolls, spooky music, misty graveyards and malevolent sentient pumpkins filled with neon orange goo. Very loosely connecting these poorly-reheated Chinese leftover set-pieces is a plot involving an evil warlock (Kyle MacLachlan,) who wants to use clocks or something to end the world.
It all plays exactly as lame and nonsensical as it sounds. It’s paced horrendously too, with the inciting incident (the story beat that gets the plot rolling,) almost coinciding with the climax This leaves a good chunk of the movie as laborious, stakes-free set-up. To say the pay-off isn’t there doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Much like Harry Potter, the basic idea here is for the magical to be slyly co-existing with the mundane. But without basic emotional or narrative thrust, there’s absolutely zero milk in it. The sight of Hogwarts acceptance letters flying furiously into the Dursley’s suburban English home (much to skinny little Harry’s delight,) has more wonder and heart than every single scene in The House with a Clock in its Wall. Eli Roth stages a boy arriving to town in a bus and an evil dead man plotting an apocalypse in the exact same way: mid shot, close-ups, rinse and repeat. Everything matters so very little, and doesn’t even try to matter, that it’s actually almost charming in a backward way.