Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events wants to be many things: a magic-less Harry Potter, a Tim Burton film, one of Barry Sonnenfeld's Addams Family movies. It succeeds only as a watered-down version of those, an intermittently entertaining, episodic film that is distracting enough if you don't give it too much thought.
The Potter-esque heroes are the three Baudelaire children, 14-year-old Violet (Emily Browning), 12-year-old Klaus (Liam Aiken) and infant Sunny. When their parents die in a fire, the children are sent to live with distant cousin Count Olaf (Jim Carrey), an evil man who sets them to menial tasks while plotting to kill them and steal their fortune.
Even after the inept executor of their parents' will takes them away from Count Olaf, first sending them to snake-loving Uncle Monty (Billy Connolly) and later to neurotic Aunt Josephine (Meryl Streep), Olaf still targets them for death by disguising himself and infiltrating the kids' new homes. This is not a cheerful film, as narrator Lemony Snicket (Jude Law) points out, but it's still a children's film, so any death is strangely sanitized.
The film feels like what its title describes: a series of events that don't add up to a cohesive story. Although director Brad Silberling and screenwriter Robert Gordon come up with an ending of sorts, it's too vague and open-ended to be satisfying, and the conspiracy behind the deaths of the Baudelaire parents and Count Olaf's involvement is never quite explained.
Still, the production design and costumes create a surreal sense that blunts the effect of all the killing. Carrey is in full-on ham mode, relishing each of Olaf's new identities, but he spends enough time off-screen that his mugging is amusing rather than tiresome. Browning and Aiken are a little bland as the children, who are the real heroes of the film.
Silberling, who's made both sappy melodramas and kids' movies, combines the two a bit clumsily, but for children old enough to handle some darkness, this isn't the most unfortunate series of events they could be watching.