This family fantasy about a magical toy store and its eccentric owner is bursting with clever, fanciful ideas, yet none of them ever really connect. Watching it is like sitting in a playroom in which 48 jack-in-the-boxes go off at once. Director Zach Helm, screenwriter of Stranger Than Fiction, is his own gatekeeper – and the gates never close. There are some lovely, inspired touches – when Natalie Portman, as the store’s manager and an aspiring pianist, twiddles her fingers we hear actual notes – but even the ones that work Helm aggressively oversells. And then there is Dustin Hoffman as Magorium. Forcibly zany and uncomfortably childish, he’s like the circus clown everyone avoids.
