Children messing approximately in boats is not enough for this adaptation,which injects an adult espionage twist more Famous Five than Arthur RansomeArthur Ransome’s wholesome prewar classic of children’s literature is all approximately fresh-faced girls and boys sailing dinghies around the Lake District with no health-and-safety nonsense approximately flotation jackets. The 1930 novel is now given a pleasant-natured, whether self-conscious period adaptation that grafts on a new grownup plotline of treachery and derring-do, or probably closer to Enid Blyton’s Famous Five or John Buchan.
It is as whether the children’s innocent fantasy world of pirates and adventurers isn’t enough. The action must be ramped up. They hold to get genuine baddies to conquer,but this new and implausible line in melodrama is taken at the same pace and treated the same way as the children’s innocuous high-jinks. There is even a frankly weird and not entirely logical chase sequence aboard a train in which sinister trench-coated figures behave strangely – to say the very least – though somehow without drawing attention to themselves.
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Source: theguardian.com