First, I'm surprised that most negative reviews (<5 rating) are only from viewers that know the books (or at least one), cause the movie is not good for itself. IMHO one of the biggest mistakes are the characters of the kids. I don't know the book but I can't imagine the children were introduced like this in the original in terms of character development. Whiny, hateful, aggressive, etc... and NO, the breakup of their parents doesn't explain it at all. At least not at this intensity.
After the first half-hour I was really like "meeeh, don't care what happens with them". Another thing that added to that was the bad acting (but the adults were not better at all). Maybe that's a subjective matter, but I know a lot of movies with child actors and even Freddie Highmore, had seen him playing better in other movies so maybe the reason is to find in the script or directing. Then the seemingly repetitive fighting, where they could had better invest some time in developing the characters, story or the world about the spiderwicks (I read in the commentaries there are five books, so source material shouldn't have been the problem). All in all, the beginning (about the book = 1P) and a few good new ideas here and there (another point) are the only reasons for me to give it 3/10 in the end.
After the first half-hour I was really like "meeeh, don't care what happens with them". Another thing that added to that was the bad acting (but the adults were not better at all). Maybe that's a subjective matter, but I know a lot of movies with child actors and even Freddie Highmore, had seen him playing better in other movies so maybe the reason is to find in the script or directing. Then the seemingly repetitive fighting, where they could had better invest some time in developing the characters, story or the world about the spiderwicks (I read in the commentaries there are five books, so source material shouldn't have been the problem). All in all, the beginning (about the book = 1P) and a few good new ideas here and there (another point) are the only reasons for me to give it 3/10 in the end.