'SLUMBERLAND' AIMS FOR ENCHANTMENT, BUT GETS LOST

An early 20th-century weekly comic strip created by Winsor McCay about Little Nemo's dream world and adventures provides the very loose inspiration for Netflix's latest big-budget spectacle, "Slumberland."

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It is a blockbuster children's fantasy in the colorful over-the-top vein of "Alice in Wonderland" with a horned Jason Momoa doing a cross between Jack Sparrow and Beetlejuice on an adventure with a soft-spoken 11-year-old girl, plus Kyle Chandler sporting a beard and a fisherman sweater to rival Chris Evans'"Knives Out" look. It is earnest and fanciful and they seem to have had a massive visual effects budget to play with. So why isn't "Slumberland" more fun?

Yes, this is a story that's ultimately about grief - Chandler's sweater-wearing, lighthouse managing, storytelling single father to Marlow Barkley's Nemo is lost at sea early on and we spend the rest of the film following her as she tries to find a way to be reunited with him. But "Slumberland" is also a treasure hunt through dreams, where nightmares and dream cops are chasing her and Momoa's Flip, an outlaw in a shiny jacquard suit who has forgotten who is in the real world, describes himself as a "troubling mix of father-figure and pent-up masculinity!"