At least we know widower Brown enjoyed a healthy sex life.

Every kid imagines himself cleverer than the adults around him in a world in which punishments, naptimes, and life in general seem fundamentally unjust. Get seven rugrats together under the same roof and you have a force to be reckoned with. "Meet the Brown children," this overloaded but delightful trailer announces. They take a special pleasure in driving away their nannies in record time... until they meet their match in Nanny McPhee (Emma Thompson). She's exactly the kind of hardnosed disciplinarian they deserve. Whenever she taps that gnarled old walking stick of hers, sparks literally fly.

From Nanny McPhee's introduction on, the trailer becomes a colorful whirl of indecipherable malarkey, a blur of quick cutting and flashy nonsense. (I count 145 separate shots in the trailer. Does the preview really need to show everything that's in the movie?) From what I gather, McPhee comes in and sets the kids straight, but for whatever reason, she goes away. Enter their evil Aunt Adelaide (Angela Lansbury, looking positively Olafian), who disciplines the kids and fixes up their father (Colin Firth) with a heartless new wife.

Come to think of it, Nanny McPhee looks an awful lot like a technicolor Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (another popular children's series grounded in suffering and injustice towards kids). With one whisper of the magic word ("please," naturally), Nanny McPhee returns to assist the miserable Brown children. Her strategy, it seems, is to encourage the kids to do what they've been doing all along, redirecting the naughty tricks they used to scare away 17 separate nannies to teach Aunt Adelaide and her cronies a lesson.

Sweet dreams are made of this.

There's much throwing of green gak and lilac goop, as well as two quick glimpses of lovely Kelly Mcdonald, first working as some sort of scullery maid (her line, "Poor them," suggests she's the only woman who actually cares aboud the children) and later wearing what looks like a wedding dress. Can we guess what happens? Considering the talent involved, Nanny McPhee has the makings of a classic, and it really deserves a proper teaser to introduce the character properly. Instead, we get a trailer that basically gives away the entire plot in a confusing, inelegant manner. As long as the kids come, I suppose it does the trick.