Film Review: Harold and the Purple Crayon

Harold and the Purple Crayon
Director: Carlos Saldanha
Davis Entertainment and TSG Entertainment
In Theaters: 08.02

While it’s hardly unusual to see a film that has no business existing churned out by a Hollywood studio, it’s rarely too difficult to understand why someone thought it had potential as commercial project. Harold and the Purple Crayon stands out among other releases this summer simply because it’s such a head scratcher that anyone thought it was a good idea.

The film begins with animated segment, as a charming narrator known as Old Man (Alfred Molina, Chocolat, Spider-Man 2) introduces us to Harold, a young boy living inside a book who can bring anything to life with his drawings. As he grows into adulthood, the Old Man disappears and Harold (Zachary Levi, Chuck, Shazam!) draws a doorway out of the book and into the real world, where he discovers the complexities of life beyond the pages. Harold is followed by his loyal friends, Moose (Lil Rel Howery, Get Out, Free Guy) and Porcupine (Tanya Reynolds, Sex Education), who are instantly transformed into humans as they cross over into reality. Harold sets off to find the Old Man and meets Terri (Zooey Deschanel, Elf, New Girl) and her son, Mel (Benjamin Bottani, The Chosen). Terri accidentally hits Harold and Moose with her car, at which point she (of course) takes them home with her. Harold and Mel become fast friends, as Harold’s childlike imagination and the things that he can do with his crayon prove irresistible, but when Gary Natwick (Jermaine Clement, What We Do In The Shadows, Men in Black 3), a frustrated librarian and wannabe fantasy author, recognizes Harold as the titular character from the beloved children’s book by Crockett Johnson, he decides that he must have the crayon for himself. As Library Gary schemes and rises to power, Harold and his friends must use their creativity to protect both the real world and the world of his book.

If that plot description was half as exhausting and perplexing for you to read as it was for me to write, then we are on the same page, which is more than can be said about the movie and its source material. While I’m far from a purist when it comes to screen adaptations of books, this one is reaching so far to mold what the producers clearly saw as marketable intellectual property into a cheap attempt to make a half-baked variation of Elf that it’s practically begging for outrage from fans. The screenplay by David Guion and Michael Handelman (Dinner For Schmucks, Slumberland) is grasping at straws to turn this into a story for an adult protagonist, and can’t find a coherent way to tell it. Everyone that Harold encounters in the real world, apart from Gary, is clueless about who he is and what’s going on, yet by and large, they just go with it, with little amazement. The only way this might have been salvaged at all was with an experienced director with a clear vision, and Carlos Saldanha is sadly not that person. A veteran of animated films, including  the Ice Age series, Saldanha is taking his first stab at live-action, and unfortunately, it’s a lethal stab. Harold and the Purple Crayon is a bizarrely ugly film on a visual level, as Saldanha has no idea how to frame his 6’3 leading man in the same shot with an ensemble that is decidedly shorter, making for shots that frequently cut off half of Levi’s head and ignore basic rules of shot composition. The visual effects are embarrassingly bad for a film with a $40 million budget, which may be modest by modern blockbuster standards, but it’s far from nothing. 

The influence of Elf is constantly apparent, and the model for Harold is clearly Will Ferrell’s endearingly zany man child, Buddy. Levi seems to be going for this, though it just plays like a recycled and less subtle version of his Shazam! characterization. Deschanel’s bored and detached approach suggests that she really wants to be somewhere else (who could blame her?) and Howery is largely phoning it in as well. Clement comes closest to creating a memorable character, though it’s such a strange one that feels at odds with the rest of the film that it still doesn’t work. In fact, the only pleasing performance comes from Molina, who never appears on screen and is a minimal presence even in voice over. 

Harold and the Purple Crayon is an inept and irritating debacle, and that’s coming from someone who readily admits to finding it difficult to be too harsh toward a family movie as long as it’s fairly pleasant and will hold the attention of children. The only reason to bother with this one is if you’re a super fan of Levi, and if you are there to see him, be prepared to do without his hair and some of his forehead for a shocking amount of the movie. There’s no excuse for filmmaking this shoddy, and the only thing that will save it from being a serious embarrassment to everyone involved is the knowledge that it will be almost instantly forgotten. – Patrick Gibbs

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