if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

In Dublin, one day Hubert Flynn (Pete Postlethwaite) leaves the pub and turns into a rat at home. On the next morning, the writer Phelim "Felix" Spratt (David Wilmot) visits the family and offers to write a book about Hubert. His wife Conchita Flynn (Imelda Staunton) accepts the offer and Felix moves to Hubert's room. His son Pius (Andrew Lovern) wants to kill the rat while his daughter Marietta (Kerry Condon) has a dilemma whether she introduces her boyfriend to her father or not. In Christmas, Uncle Matt (Frank Kelly) proposes to leave Hubert in a maggot farm. What will happen with the rat?"Rat" is an unfunny and senseless black humor comedy that does not work. The story uses the idea of Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" but without the talent of the famous writer and also without a message. I spent 89 minutes running time without laughing and the only thing funny is people writing that this movie is hilarious. My vote is two.Title (Brazil): "Este Rato É um Espanto" ("This Rat Is Amazing")

A Irish man living in Dublin returns home from the pub to a wife who is angry at him for staying out late. The next morning, the wife awakens to find that her husband has turned into a white rat. There are many ways in which this premise could provide hilarious results. Unfortunately, Wesley Burrows, who wrote the script to "Rat", failed to think of many good ones. What results is a story that feels half-baked, a premise that was obviously not thought out very well, and questionable motivations on the part of the main characters.It takes only ten minutes for the setup of the story to be complete, and it is not enough time to get this story going. You see Irishman Hubert Flynn (Veteran actor and Academy Award nominee Pete Postlethwaite) going to a pub one night, then going home to angry wife Conchita (future Oscar nominee Imelda Staunton, "Vera Drake" (2004)). The next morning, you see Conchita and her two grown kids (daughter Kerry Condon and son Andrew Lovern) at the breakfast table. When the camera turns to show you Flynn, Postlethwaite is not there, but in his place is a rat.How did he turn into a rat? Why did he turn into a rat? Why a rat? Why not a dog, or even an elephant? The movie never explains. It could be that Hubert led a selfish life which involved being cruel to his wife and kids. However, all you see is him going to a pub, then going home. Wow, THAT makes his a really unique Irishman (Note my sarcasm if you haven't already). Even stranger, Conchita is still yelling at her husband to finish his breakfast, and doesn't care if he turned into a rat. What the movie should have shown you is Conchita discovering that her husband turned into a rat, and reacting in some way. She could have screamed in agony, or she could have thought that her husband left her, and that a rat just happened to dig around her husband's clothes. Any of those scenes would have been preferable to seeing them at the dinner table together without any explanation whatsoever as to this predicament.Even stranger than that character flaw is that the news of her husband's metamorphosis makes the local radio report. Did a reporter actually come to the house and observe the husband as a rat? If he or she did, you never see it happening. Plus, throughout the movie, you see some townspeople already knowing he's a rat, and others that don't know.As you find out, the radio report is just a cheap excuse for Phelim Spratt (David Wilmott) to appear in this story. Spratt is like an ambulance-chasing lawyer, only he's a newspaper reporter who wants to write a nonfiction book about the Flynn family and how they live with their husband as a rat. Spratt's motivation is to cash in on a phenomenon, which is wicked, but understandable.To make the story even more confusing, son Pius (Lovern) is studying to become a priest, and somehow gets it in his head that it is best to kill the rat that is his father. Why? Despite the 5th Commandment, which Pius even quotes, he also picks out a passage in Genesis about intelligent design, and how man rules over animals. Amazingly, Conchita is in favor of the idea. Even though daughter Marietta (Condon) is understandably not, I could not help but think to myself, "What is wrong with you people!?!?"Not only does this Biblical "logic" fly in the face of why Phelim Spratt is living with them, but shouldn't the family be concerned with (Gee, I don't know) trying to turn their father/husband back into a human being!?!?!I feel compelled to fault this film for being illogical, but it is a fable and it is not supposed to be realistic. However, I just don't understand the motivations of this family. If they don't want to cure Hubert, and they want to kill him, there has to be an explanation for it. If he was abusive, then there is a motivation for killing him as a rat. But if you, the audience, only know the human Hubert for five minutes, that's not enough time to establish a credible motivation on the family's behalf.There are some mildly amusing scenes, like the one where the family takes the rat Hubert to a pub, and someone buys the rat a Guinness. The rest of the movie sucks, though. It's not funny, and you spend more time wondering what is going through each family member's head than what becomes of the main characters. I like movies that are made by Irish people for Irish people, but this movie is just lazy and vapid.It's a shame too, because the director is Steve Barron, who directed the far more memorable "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" (1990), "Coneheads" (1993), and Michael Jackson's iconic music video for "Billie Jean" (1982). Also, the Jim Henson Company did the special effects for the rat, and did a very good job making the rat look realistic. In fact, there are some great camera zooms where you see some great close-ups of the rat. If the script writer had put more effort into the story as other people did the special effects, this movie would be considered an underrated gem. As it stands, I don't think kids, adults, Muppet fans, or Irish people will like it.

First, "Rat" gets extra points for a very original screenplay. The fine acting is what carries this unique comedy, because the only way "Rat" works is if the characters come across as dead serious, which they do. Any decent into slapstick would have been disastrous. Another plus is the unique camera angles giving a rat's point of view. Different reactions of the various family members, to what is obviously a highly unusual situation, fuels this dark comedy. In order for a black comedy to work, it must be outrageous, not mean spirited, and deadly serious, and "Rat succeeds on all counts. I liked this clever and highly original comedy. - MERK

'Rat' is a charming, funny film that has been getting somewhat overpraised here because films from this country are generally inept, pretentious and/or cliched. 'Rat' is none of these things, and so is a cause for rejoicing, but to use epithets like 'Borgesian' seems inappropriate - the film has few of the philosophical resonances of true Borgesian films like 'Performance', 'The Spider's Strategem', 'Belle de Jour' or even 'Being John Malkovich', to which this film has been mostly compared. We are never shown what the transformation from human to rat has on Hubert's psyche; there are no questions about what it means to be human or its limits.With the exception of a couple of point-of-view shots necessary to resolve the narrative, the film takes place entirely outside Hubert's experience, focusing instead on his family's reactions, so that it's almost irrelevant that he is a rat. This distances the film somewhat from another source, Kafka's 'Metamorphosis', although both share the emphasis on family reaction. Kafka's fable is a dramatisation of alienation, from identity, body, family, society, epoque even species.Some eager critics of 'Rat' have seen it as an allegory of racism in latterday Ireland (and it is a very xenophobic society at present), but the links are tenuous - Hubert begins as a confirmed member of his society; any mocking of the family are just that, jibes at the family, just as you'll get in any society based on begrudgery or gossip (although, considering the near-sacred status of the Irish family not so long ago, this is pointed enough).Before I go on to praise the film - and it is a film, for vision and audacity, that deserves much praise - I just want to mention one more flaw - Wesley Burrowes' excellent script is frequently let down by ponderous direction, which sometimes drags out the script's nimble wit in attempts to be 'deep'.The thing that surprised me most about 'Rat' was not its modernity or intellectual sophistication, but its recreation of a certain Ireland that is only a generation old, and yet seems as remote as the Famine. It could be set in any time from the 40s to the early 70s - only the blurred clip from 'Eat the Peach' (mid-80s) and the Karaoke machine in the very last scene gives away the setting as any later (yeah, and maybe Marietta's bizarre tights). This is an Ireland mercifully free of mobile phones, go-getting yuppies and strategic planning - this is a world of Johnson Mooney and O'Brien delivery vans, quiet pints in quiet pubs, smelly bookies, young sons who want to be priests, priests who are psychotics and perform exorcisms with what appears to be bondage gear, neighbours trying to openly steal husbands, know-all brothers-in-law who know nothing.What is modern about the film is the way it captures a particular social phenomenon. With the breaking of old social and religious ties in recent years, there has been a greater personal freedom never experienced in this country. With this liberty, though, has been an increase in selfishness, in general apathy towards anyone else, and the reaction to Hubert brilliantly shows this, the family worried about how it will affect THEM, what people will think of them. Their willingness to kill is chillingly plausible (and mirrors the icy piety of pro-lifers), and maybe this is where the anti-racism comes in, that we're not used to so much prosperity and happiness, that we are violently hostile to anyone who threatens to take it from us.As an entertainment, 'Rat' is full of good things, the off-centre dialogue, the gloriously silly performances (Niall Toibin's parody of 'the Exorcist' is priceless), the arched-eyebrow situations. There are some lovely visual set-ups, the opening narration which moves from the hackneyed Romantic Irish landscape of American legend to a rat's eye view (on a boat!) of Dublin down the Liffey; the chase of Hubert as he escapes from a pub, finally upending a beer delivery truck; the second chase, the camera swooping back on a sprawling housing estate as chessboard.The revelation for me, though, was the showbands on the soundtrack. For decades the word 'showband' has been an insult, its dominance during the reactionary era seen as collusive; now we all listen to tedious, serious rock or whatever. But the Brendan Bowyer song that closes the film is remarkable, as huge, celebratory, melancholy and musically exhilarating as early Scott Walker.