Mr. Popper's Penguins (2011)
Directed by Mark Waters
Tom Popper is a successful businessman who’s clueless when it comes to the really important things in life...until he inherits six “adorable” penguins, each with its own unique personality. Soon Tom’s rambunctious roommates turn his swank New York apartment into a snowy winter wonderland — and the rest of his world upside-down.
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So have the likes of Tim Allen (The Santa Clauses) and Ray Romano (the Ice Age franchise).
And to start the laughs off, there’s a short film featuring the Scrat from the “Ice Age” films prior to the film.
Under the workmanlike direction of Mark Waters ("Freaky Friday," "The Spiderwick Chronicles"), the movie centers around the fundamental gimmick of pitting Carrey and his trademark physical comedy against a group of scurrying and noisy penguins (lensed with a combination of live-action shots and well-rendered CGI animation), which seem to take to Popper's pad like fish to water, even settling down in a cozy corner of his freezer.
It’s hard to believe that this junk was directed by Mark Waters, who presided over the big-screen adaptation of The Spiderwick Chronicles , a smart, scary adaptation of a children’s book series that honors its source material almost as much as Mr. Popper’s Penguins doesn’t.
So what the screenwriters and Mark Waters, the director of “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past“ and “The Spiderwick Chronicles,” do is turn it into a generic and sentimental dad-lost-his-family-because-he-was-married-to-his-job story, sort of “The Haunted Mansion” or “Imagine That” without Eddie Murphy.
For instance, the sub-story involving Popper's teen daughter (Madeline Carroll from "Flipped") liking a boy but not feeling her father can give her good advice leads to a few moments that are more touching than what we normally get in a family comedy.
That’s why he lost Amanda (Carla Gugino) and why Janie (Madeline Carroll of “Flipped”) and Billy (Maxwell Perry Cotton) don’t trust “Popper,” as they call him — too many broken play dates and broken promises.