Lemony Snicket's A series of Unfortunate Events

Herald rating: ****

In a restaurant at the end of the universe Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm were slugging shots of absinthe. When they called for another drink, the waiter brought a tray. In his other life the waiter was a writer called Daniel Handler. He absorbed his customers' conversation, went home, fired up his laptop and wrote 11 books under the pen-name of Lemony Snicket.

The first three of those books are distilled into Brad Silberling's all-star - okay, all-adult-star - feature. With its good kids v bad adults theme, some have cast it as an American answer to the Harry Potter franchise, but it's an altogether darker, more literary concept. For a start, the lost kids' surname is Baudelaire.

And they are 14-year-old Violet (Emily Browning), the inventor; Klaus (Liam Aiken), the intellectual; and Sunny (twins Kara and Shelby Hoffman), the toddler who loves Scrabble and running wild. Early in the piece the family banker, Mr Poe (yep, he's played by Timothy Spall) tells the children that their parents have died in a fire at the family mansion and they're going to live with their uncle, Count Olaf (Jim Carrey).

Count Olaf will turn out to be an off-the-wall actor who is at times an Italian snake doctor's assistant, a crusty old sea-salt and ... someone who is trying to murder the kids to get his hands on their inheritance.

Mr Poe twigs something is not right and moves the youngsters to the care of Uncle Monty (Billy Connolly) and his snakes, then on to the even more eccentric Aunt Josephine (Meryl Streep).

Wonderful as it is, and twisted as Carrey's latest Peter Sellers-like performance may be, the movie doesn't really capture the magic of the books. But that comes from the perspective of a kid who grew up reading and imagining characters and situations from words on a printed page. To a younger generation, this will be a marvellous tour of the imagination.

On the DVD, you'll find two commentaries. Silberling's solo effort is interesting. The second, with "the real Lemony Snicket" beside him, reveals that the series is not just dark, it has some distinctly discomforting undertones.

* DVD, Video rental out now