Not Quite Amazing, Terry Pratchett Adaptation The Amazing Maurice Is Endearingly Strange and Dark
Adapting Terry Pratchett’s Carnegie-winning Discworld book, The Amazing Maurice is a successfully wry, odd, utterly British spin on the Shrek-like self-aware fairy tale. Stuffed with motormouths and throwaway gags, the chunky animation can be a little off-putting, but its momentary ugliness feeds into its delightfully dark villains, its underdog heroes and the strange story tying them all together. This isn’t pristine, groundbreaking, photoreal CG, but cartoonishness that suits its oddballs—and might even give a kid a stray nightmare or two. As a former kid with a lot of affection for the animated movies that used to freak me out, that’s a compliment.
Turning the Pied Piper story on its head, and then flipping it around again so that it’s right-side up but utterly disoriented, The Amazing Maurice asks plenty of its young audience. They’d better be able to keep up with Malicia’s (Emilia Clarke) rapid sledgehammer blows smashing through the fourth wall, because the narrator finds herself wrapped up in her own story; they’d also better be able to parse the nested myths explaining how some of the tale’s animals came to grasp such intelligence. But, because the film has faith in its young viewers, it’s completely achievable.
Perhaps it’s because the lore, and the narrative skirting around its edges, is so silly. The talking tabby Maurice (Hugh Laurie) and his clan of equally magic rats (filled with endearingly named members like David Tennant’s wizened old leader, Dangerous Beans) don’t show up with a particularly trenchant goal in mind. They arrive as scammers, working with recorder virtuoso Keith (Himesh Patel) to scare townsfolk with a pest problem, then just as quickly rid them of it—for a generous donation, of course. The kingdom they traverse is dependent on a rat-based logic; the next town they hit is already dominated by mysterious rat-catchers and, still, somehow, blighted by famine.
Written by one of the people behind the Shrek script, Terry Rossio, The Amazing Maurice’s screenplay is quick with the set-ups and quicker with the jokes. If you’re going for pure speed, you can’t beat the mile-a-minute performance from Clarke, whose penchant for speedy delivery and comic guilelessness remind you of how much energy she brings to even her most underwhelming rom-com projects. Laurie’s arrogant charm provides a winning counterbalance, though the film eventually introduces enough characters (myriad rats, a mayor, the actual and very frightening Pied Piper, and even Death) that the main performances can get a little lost in the shuffle. Until then—especially until the film wanders off on an extended sidequest with Malicia and Keith, the latter of whom is nearly a parody of non-character protagonists—it’s an engaging children’s mystery with just-clever-enough commentary on narrative structure and bedtime story tropes.