2003, PG, 78 minutes

Hollywood hasn’t been kind to Dr. Seuss lately. A few years ago Ron Howard’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas dropped into movie audiences' laps like coal into a stocking. It was a film devoid of any of the charm of Seuss’s book. Instead it gave us Jim Carrey basically playing himself, only greener. I remember saying a special prayer on the way back home from that film, basically asking my higher power to stop these “creative artists” from turning classic stories into horrible movies.

Well, I suppose my higher power must have been busy, because into local theaters pops The Cat in the Hat, the latest Seussical masterpiece to be completely gutted by the motion picture industry. In all fairness, expectations weren’t high from the get go, but after the first few minutes of the film it seemed like maybe everything would be all right. Dakota Fanning and Spencer Breslin do a really good job setting up the characters of Sally and Conrad, sister and brother who can’t seem to get along. Sally is a goody-two-shoe who can’t be spontaneous and Conrad is a kid that can’t seem to stay out of trouble. He gets into so much trouble that his mother (Kelly Preston) is seriously considering shipping him off to a military school that her boyfriend Quinn (Alec Baldwin) brings her a brochure for.

Things go haywire at mom’s workplace and she ends up having to leave the children with a babysitter, and as Sally and Conrad contemplate the boring day ahead of them, they soon find more mischief than the two of them can handle, in the form of the films title character. Unfortunately this is where the movie takes a hard turn for the worse.

Mike Myers bursts onto the screen as the Cat in the Hat, but this cat seems to be more closely related to the Cowardly Lion of the Wizard of Oz (maybe his mentally challenged nephew) than anything written by Dr. Seuss. Myers bounds around the screen in cat drag, basically doing a montage of all the characters we have already see him do, and that’s too bad because Myers is a very gifted comedian, but rather than try to expand on the Cat character (the source material is pretty thin as far as character exposition goes), we get some butt and fart jokes with at least one prostitute gag thrown in for good measure (sure I get the double-entendres, but should they even be in a movie based on a children’s classic?). Any scene that he’s in is almost a guarantee that you will not laugh, save one or two bits that muster a smirk.

Another troubling aspect of this “adaptation” is that the best parts of the movie aren’t involved with the original book in any way. The scenes with Alec Baldwin are really funny, but they seem out of place in what is supposed to be a kid’s movie. The filmmakers surely wanted to have something that appealed to adults as well as children, but shouldn’t a good children’s movie, like Finding Nemo for example, be able to appeal to both age groups without having to completely sell out the source material? The reason that The Cat in the Hat is so beloved by adults and children alike is because it is as much fun for the parent to read aloud as it is for their child to listen to, and the message is clear. In this film, there is no cleverness, unless hearing Mr. Myers yell “Ohhh Yeahh” a dozen or so times, or having his character pull out a picture of the kid’s mom like it’s a Playboy centerfold counts as clever.

For sure, little kids are going to eat this picture up. They will giggle at the antics of Thing 1 and Thing 2. They’ll be in awe of all the CG created wizardry, and they’ll take delight in the gags and jokes offered to them by The Cat in the Hat, but I can’t help but think that they’ll be laughing in much the same way they laugh when they hear the word “poo," which seems to be the one word that The Cat in the Hat has adapted more closely than all the words of Dr. Suess.