Available at Amazon.com
Directed by
Bob Shaye
Cast
Chris O’Neil ………. Noah Wilder
Rhiannon Leigh Wryn ………. Emma Wilder
Joely Richardson ………. Jo Wilder
Timothy Hutton ………. David Wilder
Rainn Wilson ……. Larry White
Kathryn Hahn ………. Naomi Schwartz
Michael Clarke Duncan ………. Nathanial Broadman
Kirsten Williamson ………. Sheila Broadman
Irene Snow ………. Teacher in Meadow
Marc Musso ………. Harry Jones
Nicole Muñoz ………. Girl with Braces
Scott E. Miller ………. School Guard (as Scott Miller)
Megan McKinnon ………. Wendy
Randi Lynne ………. Julie the Babysitter
Tom Heaton ………. Future Scientist
Running Time: 94 minutes
Rated PG
DVD Release date: July 10, 2007
A Harry Potter-looking kid named Noah and his ridiculously precocious sister Emma find a Hellraiser cube while vacationing on Whidbey Island. Upon opening up this devious looking thing, they discover a translucent lime green TV remote. Later than night, the Hellraiser cube smoothly transitions into a Mary Poppins bag, as the little girl keeps pulling more and more stuff out of it, including a old-tymey and evil-looking stuffed bunny named Mimzy.
Mimzy talks in a series of E.T./ Gizmo gurgles that are really telepathic messages sent only to Emma. Soon Emma is levitating stones, and Noah is teleporting golf balls and cans of Sprite. Eventually, Emma seems to be conjuring up something nefarious and Noah starts commanding spiders to make bridges for him by making kazoo noises in their general direction.
Were Mimzy a horror picture, their parents would’ve already gone through three exorcists.
The kids are soon in over their tiny heads when the USA PATRIOT act allows good guy FBI agent Michael Clarke Duncan to kidnap the entire family. The kids and their stuffed animal baffle the world’s top experts, especially when science guys find the Intel logo etched on the bunny’s ultra-futuristic nanotechnology.
Helping the kids along their mysterious path is Noah’s psychic science teacher (Rainn Wilson from TV’s The Office) and the teacher’s lotto obsessed palm-reading girlfriend.
In the end, we end up finding out that Mimzy is somewhere between the T-800 and the specter who haunts Donnie Darko. That is to say, he is a rabbit sent from the future to kill Linda Hamilton.
No, wait, he is sent back to collect human innocence, something which has been lost in the future due to “DNA pollution.”
Killing Linda Hamilton would’ve been much cooler.
The Last Mimzy is a weird mix of Jungian bullstuff, speculative science, pseudo-science, and vague anti-science. In it’s self-contained world, everybody always has the best of intentions, we are all made of stars, and almost every nonsense idea that has ever been put forth proves true. There isn’t enough action to qualify the film as an adventure. There aren’t satisfying answers to qualify the film as a mystery. The characters react in realistic and human ways less than half of the time, so I’d be hard-pressed to call the film a drama.
Mostly the film is a few scenes of spectacle sandwiched in a world of New Age mumbo-jumbo.
The DVD
Audio and Visual
The film looks and sound as it should.
The Extras
There are actually 5 times more features on this DVD that there is information to be given about the movie. It’s one of these New Line “Infinifilm” deals so it is packed with an incredible amount of various and sundry featurettes.
This is especially true considering it is a one disc release. I’ve got 2-disc collections with a lot less stuff.
The actual “Infinifilm” mode basically pops up the option for a short featurette or two at the beginning of each scene. I’m not really sure who it is that finds this appealing. “I know! Let’s watch a kid movie, but let’s interrupt the movie 2 dozen times or so to learn more about the making of the movie, to watch alternate takes, and to watch professors speculate about the possibilities of time travel! Huzzah!”
I figured that would be the sort of person who says “huzzah!”
The infinifilm features can be watched separately and consist of about a dozen deleted/alternate scenes, comparisons between Mimzy‘s Emma and her Wonderland predecessor Alice, and mini-docs on just about everything from how the ear works to interviews with Jungian experts and a Tibetan Lama. It is a weird collage of useful information, junk, and speculation, with no particular rhyme nor reason, all delivered at about a 4th grade level.
In addition to this thing, we are also afforded the standard Director’s Commentary. There is also a subtitle-ish “Fact Track” that I couldn’t get to work on my DVD player. Speaking of stuff that won’t play on my DVD player, there is a DVD-rom section of Mimzy allegedly featuring games and whatnot.
There is more Mimzy here than any rational being could ever want, and this plethora of infotainment white noise bred in me a resentment of all things lagomorph.
