Mousehunt

1997 mouse movie

Rating: 16/20 (Jen: 15/20, Dylan: 15/20; Emma: 18/20; Abbey: 18/20)

Plot: Two down-on-their-luck brothers who don't really get along inherit a seemingly worthless house and a string factory from their father. They find out that the house is potentially worth millions, the lost design of a famous architect, and start fixing the place up. In their way stands a mouse who isn't happy about the human intrusion. Mousehunt!

"A world without string is chaos!"

I've seen this one many times, but I hadn't seen it in several years. Always really liked this one, a vibrant family non-animated cartoon comedy that's fun for adults and children and only slightly risque for the latter. There's a visual flamboyance--maybe expected given director Verbinski's later work--that I really like, and the special effects are really great. The shots that follow the mouse as it maneuvers through tight spaces in the house are a lot of fun, and my family started making fun of me when I kept asking, "How are they getting the mouse to do that?" It's hard to tell which scenes involve a live trained mouse and which ones are manufactured with the magic of special effects, so I'm just going to assume the whole thing is done with a real mouse and declare that mouse to be the greatest mouse actor and stuntmouse to ever grace the silver screen. Speaking of rodents, I'm now two-thirds of the way to a rodent trifecta after this and Rat. Somebody suggest a third for me. Rodent trifecta would be a good name for a punk band, by the way. The human actors are almost as good as the mouse. Nathan Lane and Lee Evans bounce off each other well, both stretching these unrealistic comic situations--enough comic mischief to give this a PG rating without the aforementioned risque scene--as far as they can without destroying any potential for believability. Lee gets the funniest moment in this or almost any other movie I've seen recently during a scene where he screams "I've got you now, little guy" at an auction. That whole scene is slapstick perfection though. Christopher Walken has a small part as Caesar the Exterminator, an underappreciated role. Only Walken can deliver a line like "What's that--horse? Fiendish! I won't eat it!"--a line that looks completely nonsensical on paper--and turn it into comedy gold. William Hickey, playing the boys' father in flashback and in painting form, looks like he could fall to pieces at any moment. There's an absurdity to the action scenes and a few no-way-real-people-survive-that moments that might remind you of Home Alone but with a mouse, and the overall flashy comic tone gives it just the right amount of cartoonishness. It's like Tom and Jerry or a Donald Duck short where you know the characters will be OK even after you just watched them explode. There are a few darker comic moments though, including a wowser opening that shows the tail-end of a funeral that sets an irreverent and humorously violent tone for the rest of the movie. The music's terrific, too. I don't think this first feature from Gore Verbinski is highly regarded, but I think it's a very entertaining and almost special little movie.