CNN
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A film about desires turns into the stuff of nightmares in Netflix’s totally faulty “Slumberland,” an try to construct a sprawling fable journey from the bones of the early-Twentieth-century newspaper sketch. Maximum notable as a car for Jason Momoa, this wannabe spectacle from “The Starvation Video games” director Francis Lawrence serves up numerous particular results desperately on the lookout for a tale.
The plot starts with a well-known kid-movie setup: A tender woman named Nemo (Marlow Barkley, in a gender change from the comedian) residing in a lighthouse clear of the arena along with her being concerned father (Kyle Chandler). When dad is misplaced at sea, she’s despatched to are living along with her buttoned-up uncle (Chris O’Dowd) within the giant town, discovering an get away in her desires.
The area of desires is described as “an international and not using a outcome,” however as built, that is available in a film and not using a transparent inventive compass, proving extra mystifying than magical. Alternately zany and sappy, the previous impulse is embodied via Momoa’s Turn, who is living within the dream global and, along with his horns and hat, resembles an unholy pass of the Mad Hatter, the Ghost of Christmas Provide and a refugee from the island of Dr. Moreau.
Nemo and Turn cross on a sequence of adventures in pursuit of a valuable artifact, with the promise that via journeying during the desires of others, she’ll one way or the other have the ability to see her father once more. Alongside the best way, they run afoul of one thing known as the Bureau of Unconscious Actions, a surreal forms that sees Turn as an outlaw.
Netflix has already made a giant guess on desires with “The Sandman,” however the common conceit right here widely brings to thoughts the vintage movie “Time Bandits,” despite the fact that any comparability most commonly simply displays how laborious that mixture of caprice and irreverence is to grasp, and the way conspicuously “Slumberland” falls wanting it.
Most likely principal, it’s tough to resolve for whom “Slumberland” is meant, as opposed to Momoa fanatics and a more youthful target audience numbed sufficient via videogames, most likely, to be dazzled via the creative manufacturing design and untroubled via the thinness of the tale.
Streaming services and products are patently dazzled via the promoting price of megastar energy, and Momoa – who seemed reverse any other younger woman the dreary “Candy Lady” final yr, in addition to the sooner sequence “Frontier” – as all the time supplies a muscular dose of it. The ones attributes really feel wasted, alternatively, within the surreal confines of “Slumberland,” which, as amusement-park-type names cross, doesn’t even qualify as a pleasant position to seek advice from.
“Slumberland” premieres November 18 on Netflix.