About two months ago, my wife and I bought a house. Since then, we've been up to our ears in bags, boxes and bubble wrap. When we haven't been sorting, packing and ferrying our belongings from one place to another, we've been working extra hours to build up our funds again.

So when we got the chance to sneak off to a movie, we both knew what we wanted -- a nice, fun children's fantasy, with magic and humor and a feel-good ending.

What we didn't know was that The Last Mimzy didn't fit the bill. The trailer, with its "Let's dump sugar into daddy's bowl" scene and numerous shots of a cute stuffed bunny, tricked us into thinking this would be light and playful. If we'd done our research, we would've realized it was closer to E.T. than Nanny McPhee, and nowhere near as good.

Summary of a sci-fi story

The Last Mimzy, as we found out later, is loosely adapted from Mimsy Were the Borogoves, a 1942 short story by Lewis Padgett. In the original, an alien scientist experiments with time travel by sending two boxes of children's toys into the past. One of them lands in 1942, and is found by a 7-year-old boy, who takes it home. He and his 2-year-old sister play with the toys, learning how they work. Their secrecy and unusual behavior worries their parents, who call in a child psychologist; he tells them the children's brains are being conditioned by the toys, and the parents have to figure out whether they should allow this to happen -- and if they even have a choice in the matter.

The movie takes the basic premise, throws out the more cerebral bits (as well as the reference to Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky), and shoves in all sorts of additional ideas, all in the quest to fill 90 minutes of screen time. The lone alien experimenter is gone, replaced by a scientist trying to save his people's world from pollution. Noah (Chris O'Neil) and Emma (Rhiannon Leigh Wryn), the children, are older and more articulate (if less careful about keeping things hidden from adults), and their odd behavior is more about special abilities such as telekinesis and talking to spiders than alien ways of thinking. The father (Timothy Hutton) is a distracted workaholic, with the mother (Joely Richardson) being paranoid enough for both of them. And if the stakes weren't high enough, an accidental blackout of the Pacific Northwest gets the government involved.

No wonder, then, that it took me until the next morning to remember I'd read Padgett's original story. There certainly wasn't much of it in the movie!

An E.T. wannabe

The Last Mimzy wants to be a great sci-fi movie, but doesn't come close. The special effects are serviceable but not special, and the story lacks the interest or originality of its source material. The government subplot in particular should've been trimmed or left on the cutting room floor entirely; instead of tension, it provides predictability, as well as a few moments of disbelief. Could two kids in a truck really get past guards? How could Noah reach the pedals, anyway? And, as my wife asked, could a car really beat a helicopter to the family's beach house? The tedium and plot holes are just not worth the one truly funny Intel joke, and the climax is unnecessarily scary, particularly to small children. Also a candidate for drastic editing: the too-hoky-for-words scenes set in a future where everyone dresses like flower children, flies and speaks telepathically.

To their credit, the actors are all game, particularly O'Neil, Wryn and Hutton, who looks like a younger Kevin Kline. Rainn Wilson (of The Office) and Kathryn Hahn, who play Noah's science teacher and his hippie girlfriend, were my favorite characters; funny and intense, they keep you guessing which side they're on until the chase scene near the end. That's more than can be said for Joely Richardson, who hits a high note of paranoia very early on and stays there for the rest of the movie. As for Michael Clarke Duncan, he's saddled with a thankless role as a Homeland Security operative. His job is basically to stand around with a furrowed brow and say in his deep voice, "I don't get it." Well, Mr. Duncan, I don't quite know why you're there either.

The verdict: 2 1/2 stars

I might've ranked The Last Mimzy a bit higher if I'd gone in expecting sci-fi instead of fantasy ... but not much higher. And while I liked the movie at the time, the story didn't hold up under closer inspection, and suffers in comparison to Padgett's original.

Recommended: No

Movie Mood: None of the Above
Viewing Method: Other
Film Completeness: Looked complete to me.
Worst Part of this Film: Plot