Review: 'The Nutcracker' is under-realised fantasy

Film: The Nutcracker
Cast: John Turturo, Pepe Balderrama, Jonathan Coyne, Nathan Lane, Elle Fanning
Director: Andrev Konchalovskiy
Rating: *

Writer–director Andrev Konchalovskiy sets out to merge Tchaikovsky while integrating Nazi meanness with E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Nutcracker and the resultant is pretty much unremarkable.

Nine-year-old Mary's (Elle Fanning) dull Viennese Christmas is suddenly filled with excitement and adventure following the arrival of uncle Albert Einstein, his fantasy toy house and it’s inmates-who come alive because Mary believes in them.

The tinsel and snowflakes appear as mere dressed up artifice in a bewildering story that involves the wooden nutcracker a.k.a a cursed Prince (Charlie Rowe)in a battle for world domination against the Rat King (John Torturo) and his Rat Queen mother (Frances De la Tour) who have enslaved the population of his principality. The mice are Nazified rats who have herded the people of old Vienna into toy burning labour camps.

The original Nutcracker was a fairytale built on tragedy but this one is a nightmare. The music though borrowed, appears crudely put-together, the performances (save for Elle Fanning’s Mary) look deadened and the narrative appears completely overwhelmed by it’s own savaging interpretation. The screenplay is pretty weird. The songs by Eduard Artemiev and Tim Rice are pretty much boring and the effects are also quite lacking in the lustrous charm expected from a fantasy of this scale.