Enter Nanny McPhee (Emma Thompson). As you have by no doubt already figured, she is not your average nanny, and this is not your average children's movie. For starters, Mr. Brown makes his living building coffins (his motto notes that what's bad for others -- namely, death -- is good for business) and lives in a house that looks like a Technicolor bordello.

Though the events themselves are nowhere near as unfortunate as anything Lemony Snicket might dream up, the children have lost one parent and stand to gain a most disagreeable stepmother by the end of the month by edict of their Great Aunt Adelaide (Angela Lansbury, looking positively Olaf-ian behind her beak-shaped prosthetic nose, only here she holds the fortune instead of scheming to get it).

Although such elements lend the film an edge most American children's films wouldn't dare, Nanny McPhee is actually quite conventional in virtually every other regard. This is, after all, Mary Poppins turned on its head. Where sing-songy Mary Poppins doles out spoons full of sugar when her charges feel poorly, Nanny McPhee forces burbling measle paste upon the young savages -- and teaches them valuable lessons about responsibility and manners.

"When you need me, but do not want me, then I will stay," Nanny McPhee warns the children when she first arrives. "When you want me, but do not need me, then I have to go."

"We will never want you!" retorts Simon, the oldest and most incorrigible of the Brown children. If the movie were to work perfectly, the audience would feel the same way when Nanny McPhee first arrives -- terrified and defiant -- then only gradually would they come to love the old hag as the children themselves warm up to her. But there's not a child among the bunch who seems anything less than a miserable brat. Who then will viewers identify with?

As for Nanny McPhee's discipline strategies, they are convoluted and confusing, and her powers are strange to say the least (her warts disappear and she becomes more beautiful as the children learn to mind).

Consider the kitchen scene mentioned earlier, in which the kids have overrun the last adult sanctuary in the house. When they refuse to stop, Nanny McPhee casts a spell that accelerates their mischief, bringing them to the brink of disaster until they relent and say "please." The scene, like each of the five lessons she plans to impart, makes no sense, and yet there's a colorful energy to it that may at least delight the youngsters in the crowd. Parents, meanwhile, may question a movie that indirectly seems to encourage naughty behavior.

[as featured in The Miami Herald]