Seeing this movie was not on the top of my to-do list. Don’t ask me why I ended up seeing it. I had a mental image of all the movies I really wanted to see, movies that would bend my mind, enhance my knowledge, inspire me to become a person who studied toenail fungus.

But not this one.

However, that doesn’t mean "Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events" is a bad movie. I actually found it to be pretty entertaining. It involves three children who suddenly become orphans because their mansion and everything in it (including their parents) suddenly burst into flames for some freak reason and are burnt to a crisp within a few minutes, which begins the mystery of the movie. The oldest of the three is named Violet, who has a slightly ridiculous skill of inventing amazing, Nobel-winning things. The next is her 12-year-old brother, Klaus, who reads everything possible and just happens to remember everything in those books of his. Then there’s the toddler Sunny, who, like all toddlers, could bite through anything and talks in gibberish and the subtitle people had another job to do when they translated her gobbledygook. The actors did do their job, and they really weren’t all bad, although almost all children actors can get on one’s nerves once in a while. I don’t know why, they just do.

So the orphans are brought to their distant uncle Count Olaf’s rickety mansion and they are sent to work on his decapitated wreck of a house while Olaf (Jim Carrey) tries to kill them to get the children’s inherited money. Here is where the film really starts to kick off, for where the depressing story and orphans lack in fun, Jim Carrey gladly evens the scales. Not only is he quite entertaining, but the other actors in the movie just become comic fuel for him to feed off while the story goes on. Jim Carrey also becomes the moving force in the entire film, for everything revolves around this antagonist who you like better than the heroes.

So the kids are pushed around from one psycho foster parent to another, some you like, such as the avid snake fan Uncle Monty and the paranoid Aunt Josephine (a pleasantly wacky Meryl Streep), and… that’s it. Otherwise it’s just Olaf pretending to be a nerdy scientist and a surly sailor, who you like because Carrey still remains very funny while keeping the story going, and it goes fairly fast. The story is aided by the narration of Lemony Snicket, played by Jude Law, who must have never slept while he was making this movie because of the fact that he had what, six other films being shot then? His narration is quite smart and helpful in keeping us up-to-date with the story, and we needed someone to explain the moral of the story, anyway.

If you haven’t guessed, I haven’t read the books nor do I intend to, but I suppose people who have read them will like the storyline, because if you haven’t guessed already, the plot in the movie is the same as the books. Others will like the bizarre and dreamlike sets, the occasionally very wise script and, of course, Jim Carrey. I didn’t love the movie, but I didn’t hate it, I just think there are better winter movies out there for you to see.