Nathan Lane, Lee Evans
Lane and Evans play two not-especially-close brothers who inherit a decrepit old house after their eccentric father, a string magnate named Smuntz, sloughs off the mortal coil. When they discover that this ruin is actually the long-forgotten design of an architectural genius, they decide to renovate it and auction it off for millions. But first they must deal with the current tenant: a wily little mouse who, like Macaulay Culkin with whiskers, socks them with one violent booby trap after another.
The rodent, a composite performance of computer animation, animatronic puppetry and more than 60 trained mice, is as cute as he is ingenious (see story, page 66). I also liked the psychokiller cat and the deranged exterminator (Christopher Walken—who else?). But Mouse Hunt has been given an unnecessarily dark, grim look, and the slapstick comedy is defeated by a basic incongruence of scale—two big men whooping and shrieking in the presence of a furry, scampering speck. The Three Stooges probably wouldn't have been all that funny, either, if one of them had been a gerbil or a squirrel. (PG)
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