Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax

Directed by Chris Renaud

(PG)

**

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The latest big-screen take on a Dr. Seuss book gets a few things right and some major things wrong, said Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune. It re-creates the look of Seuss’s “voluptuously curvy universe,” but “you couldn’t accuse the film of practicing what it preaches: careful stewardship of a precious resource.” It’s more impressive as a work of ecological propaganda than it is as “pure entertainment,” said Jon Niccum in The Kansas City Star. Danny DeVito “brings acres of verve” to providing the voice of the squat, bushy-browed title character, but he rarely holds center stage. The Lorax and his signature battle against a tree-hacking industrialist are forced to compete with a new wraparound story about a boy (voiced by Zac Efron) courting the girl next door (Taylor Swift) in the denatured landscape that their generation has inherited. Hollywood should have learned by now that “Seuss’s slim books would work better as short films,” said Chris Hewitt in the St. Paul, Minn., Pioneer Press. The Lorax isn’t an abomination along the lines of 2000’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas. But it “definitely feels padded.”