Directed by: Mark Waters
Starring: Jim Carrey, Carla Gugino, Madeline Carroll, Maxwell Perry Cotton
Rating: PG

Jim Carrey stars in Mr. Popper’s Penguins. (Courtesy photo)

I always like to see basic storylines done with a twist, and Mr. Popper's Penguins is just that. It's a variation on the classic character-has-to-deal-with-an-unexpected-challenge-that-ultimately-proves-itself-rewarding story. The twist, unfortunately, is that we couldn't care less about the main characters. Any heartwarming message this movie has gets distorted and lost, replaced with indifference and the stench of hoity-toity New York elitism.

Tom Popper (Jim Carrey, I Love You Phillip Morris) is divorced from his wife Amanda (Carla Gugino, Watchmen) and only sees his kids every other weekend. That's fine with him—it gives him more time to work. He's in the business of acquiring hard-to-get buildings and plots of land, and his newest target is the Tavern on the Green, a swanky Central Park restaurant. But then his father dies and leaves him, of all things, six havoc-wreaking penguins. Unable to get rid of them, he tries to be as inconspicuous as possible about them. When his kids, Janie (Madeline Carroll, Swing Vote) and Billy (Maxwell Perry Cotton, TV's Brothers and Sisters), meet the penguins, they instantly take a liking to them—meaning Popper has no choice but to keep them, lest he seem like a bad father. So he turns his apartment into an enormous freezer, filled with snow and ice to make the penguins feel at home. Gradually, the penguins start to bring the family together, turning Popper into the family man the Tavern owner wants to see in a potential buyer, but then a determined zookeeper starts trying to take them away. What starts as a battle for the Tavern turns into a struggle to keep the penguins, and a fight to reunite the family.

The book on which the movie is based is about a lower-class worker. In the adaptation, however, writers Sean Anders, John Morris, and Jared Stern have made Mr. Popper abundantly wealthy, turning the cast of characters into a horde of upper-crust socialites. In other words, our main characters are used to having what they want. So when the penguins are inevitably taken away, the kids whine and blame their dad and pull the "You promised!" card. Forgive me for not sympathizing; I've never even had a pet, let alone ones that belong in the Antarctic. Director Mark Waters (Mean Girls) doesn't take his time setting up the movie's situations or conflicts, so the kids come across as bratty and spoiled, and Popper as undeserving of such a high-maintenance family. And then there's the zookeeper, our bad guy, who just looks like a sensible man trying to do his job.

Jim Carrey is goofy, as usual, if perhaps a little less so than he has been in the past. It's fine, though, since the movie isn't a Jim Carrey silly-faces-and-noises vehicle so much as it is a cute animals vehicle. And the animals are very cute, so that's a plus. Carroll and Cotton are your typical kid actors—not only are they not particularly good, but the writers feel justified in dumping predictable schlock on them, such as Janie's so-clichéd-it-hurts boy troubles. Gugino and Carrey connect well—which, I suppose, is problematic, considering they're supposed to be playing divorced parents. The way we see them, we wonder why they would ever have divorced in the first place.

Mr. Popper's Penguins isn't so much bad as it is annoying. It bears a wholly stupid message—that the things that united the family must always be there, or else everyone falls into disrepair. It's a movie about how things, not experiences or genuine feelings, can build lasting connections between people. They're happy at the start, happy at the end, and for the most part happy in the middle. Where's the struggle? Any uplifting aspects the original novel might have had—with the lower-class man who rises out of anonymity and forms a special bond with his animals in the process—are gone. We're left with a movie that just feels cheap. While cheap laughs are fair game for kids' movies, a cheap premise is just lazy. And they don't get much lazier than this.

Danny Eisenberg is a 2010 graduate of the Bromfield School and is currently a student at the University of Pennsylvania.