Review: Stuart Little 2
Genre: Comedy, Family/Children's
MPAA rating: PG (for brief mild language, animals in jeopardy)
Release date: 2002
Cast: Michael J. Fox, Geena Davis, Melanie Griffith, Hugh Laurie, Nathan Lane
Written by: Bruce Joel Rubin
Directed by: Rob Minkoff

Even someone who's rodent-phobic would have a tough time resisting Stuart Little, the adorably chatty little white mouse who powered his debut movie to a $300 million score at the box office.

Yet in Stuart Little 2, neither man nor mouse nor any other critter has a prayer of holding his/her/its own once the real star of the sequel shows up: Snowbell, the worrywart feline voiced by Nathan Lane.

Sure, there's an entire story revolving around a slightly older Stuart (Michael J. Fox) trying to prove he deserves just a little more independence, despite the overprotectiveness of his sultry yet smothering June Cleaver-style human mother (Geena Davis). And as his older brother George (Jonathan Lipnicki) is increasingly occupied with his own friends, Stuart gets his first crush on a breathy-voiced bird named Margalo (Melanie Griffith), a wounded chick who's menaced by the frightening Falcon (James Woods). While sending Stuart on perilous adventures through a golden-hued, stylized Manhattan, the screenplay imparts lessons on courage, truth-telling, loyalty and more.

Even if you have no trouble embracing author E.B. White's basic fantasy of a talking mouse being adopted by a human family, you may, if your age has hit double digits, find yourself more than a little bored by this bland tale; that is, until Snowbell becomes a more vital part of the story.

Though it's possible that every one of Snowbell's lines was scripted by screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin, I'm skeptical. Rubin's work is otherwise so overwhelmingly predictable that when George and Stuart's baby sister finally utters her first words at the end of the movie, you can mouth them five minutes before she does.

Snowbell, however, is another story. He sounds much more like Lane at his dry, wry, improvisational best, a dyspeptic neurotic who would be right at home playing a gig in the Catskills (ba-dum-dum). Lane's Snowbell is the cat's meow, the best — and for many grown-ups, the only — reason to see Stuart Little 2.