Perfectly serviceable – at points even charming: Four Kids and It reviewed

This film contains flying children, time travel and a sand monster that lives under a beach — yet the most incredible thing of all is that a family get to go on holiday. They actually leave their house, drive down an actual motorway, rent an actual seaside cottage and go for actual walks, passing well within two metres of actual other people! And not once do Derbyshire police film them with a drone, then post intimidating footage of it on the internet.

The movie’s producers couldn’t have known they’d be releasing their creation into a locked-down world, but now that they have, who’s to say more people won’t watch it at home than would have watched it at the cinema? We are literally a captive audience. And there are certainly worse films to spend your time and money on. This is a perfectly serviceable — indeed at points rather charming — version of Jacqueline Wilson’s 2012 novel Four Children and It, which was itself inspired by E. Nesbit’s 1902 classic Five Children and It.

This is the first time I’ve seen a Russell Brand performance in full (my luck had to run out in the end)

I say ‘a family’ go on holiday. The clever Modern Britain twist on Nesbit’s original story is that it’s two half-families — David (Matthew Goode) and his two children, plus his new American girlfriend Alice (Paula Patton) and her brace of kids. Needless to say the respective youngsters don’t get along. Until, that is, they stumble across the sand monster (the ‘Psammead’), who is small, grouchy and — thanks largely to the fact he’s voiced by Michael Caine — a bit of a star. He grants wishes (one per day, nothing longer than a sentence) by puffing himself up, then expelling all the air. Not the usual waving of a wand, but then, as he explains, ‘some of us have to work with enchanted stomach gases’.