Double You Tee Eff.

I get it. It’s expensive to put new ideas on screen. It’s cheaper, and more profitable besides, to recycle ideas that already have a following. Nostalgia is a reasonable replacement for inspiration, if receipts are your only metric.

Eventually, though, you’re going to do irreparable damage to our nostalgia buds. Feeding us poorly thought out, cynical versions of things we once loved is just going to teach us to hate our own memories.

I’m a Doctor Seuss fan, for realzies. I have a letter from him. I wrote a sloppy poem for him that’s included in the senior yearbook I helped edit. I am in no way objective here.

Let’s start with what worked. Great job on the Truffula trees. They look pretty good. Also the fish are kind of cute.

Now the rest.

Danny DeVito is a weird choice for Lorax. I know he’s short, and the Lorax is short, but that wasn’t enough reason to cast him. If the casting was just on random physical similarities, I would have gone with WIlford Brimley. Brimley has tons more gravitas and he’s clearly the Lorax’s mustache twin. Danny’s lyrical Jersey brogue is darling, but didn’t work for me here.

In order to make a slight children’s poem about conservation into a 90 minute film, you have to add a lot of new stuff. This new stuff, however, should probably be in the spirit of the original work.

There’s a love story, and a new villain, and a bunch of running jokes that are both weak and probably ill-advised for Seuss’s target market. None of them fit. There’s a few car chases. There are dangerous thugs bent on murder. There is even Betty White as a preternaturally hip grandma. (Hollywood, please let Betty get some rest. She’s done enough for you. You are going to kill her with your grubby, grubby love.)

The real problem is that the original story doesn’t have 90 minutes in it. It’s a little screed, dated and mawkish, that is meant as a quick bedtime story. Packing it full of silly filler about first kisses and snowboarding old ladies doesn’t make ‘The Lorax’ better, only longer.

The musical numbers are all warm, damp garbage. I can’t emphasize enough how much of a misfire this thing is as a musical. While the CG artists clearly put some love into the film, it’s not enough to save the rest of this weak effort. Skip it. The book is still in print, in glorious non-IMAX 2d.

P.S. I don’t know how they got the Seuss estate to sign off on using the Lorax to sell SUVs. I don’t know what they offered, or who they have naked pictures of, but eff them. Eff their greenwashing, cynical faces.