Why can no one make a genuinely great Terry Pratchett adaptation? He’s arguably the most engaging and accessible of modern British authors, his extensive bibliography a fixture on every bookshelf in the island nation. Most especially, his 41 volumes set on the magical, satirical Discworld are as incisive as Dickens, hilarious as Twain. Pratchett was also adept at aiming different books at different audiences while still feeling Pratchett-esque.
There have been a slew of Discworld TV shows and movies but they’ve always come up short of the books. Maybe it’s because Pratchett’s storytelling is best in the aggregate: not simply a series of sequels, but as overlapping narratives, where supporting characters become leads and vice versa. So maybe that’s why the surprisingly charming The Amazing Maurice (breezily retitled from The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents) may be the most entertaining conjuring of Pratchett’s literary magic to date.
Possibly it’s because it’s the simplest, a fantastical replay of the 1971 comedy Skin Game, in which James Garner and Lou Gossett play two con men running a morally justifiable grift on Southern racists by selling Gossett’s free man into slavery over and over again. Here, it’s Maurice convincing credulous villagers that they need his ratting servives. For who would you rather hire to run off rats than a cat? What the hicks don’t know is that ginger tom Maurice (Laurie) is in on the scam with both his human “owner” (Patel) and with the pack of talking, sweet-natured rats with whom he wanders the country. It’s when they arrive in the town of Bad Blintz that their arrangement gets knotty, as the townsfolk are convinced they already have an infestation. But if so, Maurice and his gang wonder, why are there no rats to be seen? And what exactly are the local ratcatchers, and most especially the mystery-shrouded Boss Man (Thewlis), up to? And when will self-described literary heroine Malicia (Clarke) work out what everyone’s up to?
Maybe the success of The Amazing Maurice is because the book is closer to a stand-alone Pratchett than most of his works, one that doesn’t rely on knowing your Ankh from your Morpork. Maybe it’s that the script by Terry Rossio (Aladdin, Shrek) comes closer than most to translating Pratchett’s witticisms to dialogue, even if he does so by vaulting through the plot.
But it’s still not quite Pratchett-y, still a little static – most especially in the oddly flat animation – and still not quite snappy enough. But that doesn’t stop Maurice being an entertaining way to convince kids to pick up the book.
This article appears in January 27 • 2023.
