'Slumberland' review: 'Alice in Wonderland' meets 'Inception' in this sleepy Netflix adventure flick

I'll let you in on a little trade secret: in fact, movie critics want to like everything they watch. The odds may not always be in our favor, and some assignments inspire lower expectations than others, but no one shows up to work expecting to be miserable that day - let alone when they're lucky. to hold a job that offers occasional measure. pure and simple transcendence.

Which is to say that one of these days I'd be absolutely thrilled to rave about one of the brilliant, star-studded, and/or special effects original movies Netflix is ​​releasing on its platform without any marketing or festival play as part of the streamer's pact with the dark lord Satan to flood the area with movie-flavored content (last summer's "Hustle" is almost strong enough to feel like the exception that proves the rule). And while Francis Lawrence's "Slumberland" is slightly better than "The Gray Man," "Mr. Harrigan's Phone," and "The School for Good and Evil," I'm afraid today isn't that day. there.

Largely inspired by Winsor McCay's 1920s comic strip 'Little Nemo in Slumberland' - yet unfolding so obviously like a mish-mash between 'Alice in Wonderland' and 'Inception' that you can almost hear Lawrence pitch it to Netflix in these exact words - "Slumberland" is a sleep-focused storybook of a movie that's as confusing and forgettable as a real dream, and several hundred times longer.

It also makes for a pretty dramatic about-face for a guy whose previous feature was both A) an R-rated spy thriller and B) good. Alas, that's kind of how it goes for a studio executive in the age of streaming, especially a studio executive whose body of work (“Constantine,” “Water for elephants,” “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire”) reflects an admirable preference for making new mistakes at a time when most of Hollywood is happy to repeat old ones.



Swap McCay's comic book hero young boy for an 11-year-old girl of the same name (the spunky and seductive Marlow Barkley) and replace the non-linear nature of the Adventures of Nemo with a now-standard YA story about a child learning to cope with the loss of a parent, "Slumberland" begins with its best foot forward. Everything about Nemo's life feels like something out of a fairy tale: she and her lighthouse operator single father (a bearded, perfectly dreamy Kyle Chandler) live on an adorable one-house island somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, a place so isolated, twee, and saturated with candy store colors, it essentially suggests what Moonrise Kingdom might look like if it were gentrified by Willy Wonka.

"What's a lighthouse for?" Nemo's dad asks him at the end of the whirlwind montage that's sort of meant to provide the emotional underpinning for the unmoored show to come. It's the kind of question that calls for a poetically heartbreaking answer, but Nemo's dad drowns in a blue flurry of murky CGI before his daughter can figure it out on her own.

The next thing newly orphaned Nemo knows is that she lives on the Continent with her clumsy yuppie uncle Phillip (Chris O'Dowd), who is in every way the complete opposite of her late brother. Instead of a rugged outdoorsman who lives off the grid and inspires his daughter to follow her imagination, Phillip is a chalk-dry doorknob salesman who lives in a Toronto high-rise and doesn't doesn't even like stepping out of his place. He's by no means a villain, just a joyless one; O'Dowd is still a likable depresser, and his brooding stalemate provides all of this movie's funniest moments (e.g., the moment he's introduced as he takes a work call at his brother's funeral and casually explains to the person on the other end of the line that "my brother got lost at sea" He also owns a series of hardcover books called "Extraordinary Knobs", which transform into a smart gag).

Fortunately for Nemo, she can still see her father in her dreams. There is only one problem: He is not in them. Instead, the oblivious girl is greeted by a giant smelly villain named Flip (a very game Jason Momoa), who appears to be...