Release Date: December 1997
Directed By: Gore Verbinski
Written By: Adam Rifkin
Starring: Nathan Lane, Lee Evans, Demon Mouse
Runtime: 92 minutes
Budget: $38 Million

Do i hear you scoffing and rolling your eyes? "Surely you jest." "Are you serious?"
These are the responses i've become acustomed to when i tell people how much i love this movie.
A family movie that makes everybody laugh and is impossible to hate.
Go ahead try, you'll see that it's impossible.

Earnie (Nathan Lane) and Lars (Lee Evans) are brothers that have inherited a rusty old string factory and an old house from their now dead father (William Hickey who unfortunately didn't live long enough to see this great film released) and the first scene of this movie is during his funeral where things take a morbid yet hilarious turn and the movie keeps up that tone for the next 90 minutes. Earnie has moved on to bigger and better things (he owns Che Earnie and pretends to be a french master chef) and Lars gets more than he can handle when his gold-digging wife throws him out.
The brothers find themselves homeless after Earnie has a run in with a cockroach in his resturant and the siblings have no choice but to take up residence in the old house they inherited. Unbeknownst to them, the mouse from hell inhabits it and he has no plans of taking on roomates. And so an epic war ensues as the mouse and brothers try to kill each other and almost succeed many times.

Every second, every scene, every character and every set has a delightfully comic and old-timey feel to it as the story takes place in an unknown decade (i like to assume it's the fifties where technological marvels like plasma screens, colour tvs and security cams exist). The lengths the brothers go to to rid themselves of the demon mouse go to unbelievably funny lengths as they get outwitted at every turn. Even the spooky Christopher Walken in a hilarious cameo as the mouse exterminator Caeser doesn't stand a chance.

But most of the humour comes not from slap-stickys pratfalls but from the arguments the wildly different brothers get into.
Lars is the wimpy, less confident and accident prone brother. He stammers when pushed and generally lets people walk all over him. Although he is the submissive one, he reins his brother'smaniacal blood lust when needed. Earnie is the confident, smart, resourceful and somewhat cold-hearted of the two. His business savvy is what drives most of the movie as they discover their old, musky, rundown house is actually the great "Missing Larue", long-thought of as the lost masterpiece by the acclaimed architect Charles Lyle Larue. Earnie's idea is to round up all of snooty real-estate collectors in an auction to get them to outbid each other and make him-er, he and his brother filthy rich.

If only they could kill that damned mouse!

Some cynical critics have nicknamed this film "Mouse Alone". Do not be fooled.
Mouse Hunt has so much more wit, heart and charm in its hairless tail than that diabetes inducing fantasy.
Everytime it comes on tv, i have to watch it. I've memorized every joke and every scene yet i always finish this film with a smile on my face and a weird uplifting mood overcomes me. Forget the Pirates trilogy, this is Gore Verbinski's best movie and as if it needed it, this film also contains an unforgettably bouncy score by Alan Silvestiri. The icing on the cake.

For these reasons and more, Mouse Hunt qualifies as the 10th best film i've ever had the pleasure of watching over and over and over and over and over and over again.

9/10