Mouse Hunt

Once-wealthy string magnate Rudolf Smuntz dies, and he leaves his factory to his two sons; the well-meaning and optimistic Lars, and venal cynic Ernie, who has ignored the family business to become a chef. When Lars refuses a buyout from a cord company called Zeppco International, his gold digger wife April bars him from her home. Meanwhile at Ernie's restaurant, Mayor McKrinkle is dining and accidentally eats the head of a cockroach that came from the half-smoked box of Cuban cigars that was given up to Ernie, and the restaurant closes down. It was later mentioned on the news that Mayor McKrinkle died of cardiac arrest at "Our Lady Of Sorrows Hospital" when Ernie starts working at a diner.

Lars happens across the diner and the brothers reconnect, taking refuge in the abandoned Victorian mansion on the outskirts of town that was left to them by their father, who never lived there and acquired the house through a debt. While sleeping, the two are bothered by a mouse rustling around and, when investigating, find blueprints of the house, discovering that the property was the final design of famed architect Charles Lyle LaRue, finished in 1876, and would be worth a fortune if properly restored. Ernie and Lars decide to restore the property and auction it to recover their lives. During the renovations, the two accidentally destroy the mouse's home, prompting the mouse to pull even and sabotage their construction efforts. Conventional methods to get rid of the highly intelligent mouse fail as it repeatedly outwits the brothers. They resort to increasingly drastic methods to remove the mouse, including buying a psychotic cat named "Catzilla", whom the mouse drops down a dumbwaiter to his death, and then hiring an eccentric exterminator, Caesar, who is ultimately dragged out of the house by the mouse using his truck's winch, causing massive destruction to the floors and driving Caesar insane. Meanwhile, Ernie and Lars discover the house has an unpaid $1,200 mortgage on it they cannot pay off, since Ernie bought a $1,200 Jacuzzi tub. Because of their inability to pay the string factory's workers, the workers go on strike.

Ernie learns about Zeppco's offer to buy the factory and secretly plans to accept the deal. Lars goes to the string factory to make enough string to pay off the mortgage, in the process getting a small string of his blazer caught on part of a machine, and as he attempts to free himself, he is stripped completely naked except his shoes and socks. After that, he is met by April who learned about the house's worth from the brothers' lawyer and takes him back. Ernie's attempt to meet with Zeppco's representatives fails when he is hit by a bus while trying to impress two Belgian hair models, Ingrid and Hilde. Lars informs him that April has given them the money to pay off the mortgage, but the two return to the house to find Caesar being taken away by paramedics.

The brothers resume their crusade against the mouse, chasing it down with a shotgun, accidentally destroying part of the floor by shooting the bug bomb that Caesar had dropped, and then turn on each other when they overhear a voicemail exposing Ernie's attempt to secretly sell the factory and Lars previously declining their offer. During their argument, Lars throws an orange at Ernie, which hits and stuns the mouse. When the two cannot bring themselves to finish the mouse, they seal it in a box addressed to Fidel Castro. The brothers reconcile and finish their renovations. The night of the auction, however, Lars discovers the mouse's box was returned due to insufficient postage and with a hole gnawed out of it (as Lars forgot to weigh the mouse). As the auction progresses, the mouse wreaks havoc. In desperation, the brothers attempt to flush out the mouse by feeding a garden hose into the wall, causing the inner walls to fill, collapsing a wall in the room in which the auction is taking place, and flushing out the buyers. The house collapses as the buyers flee. April leaves Lars for good for a particularly rich and older bidder, and the brothers take solace in the assurance the mouse must have perished in the collapse.

The brothers sleep the night in the factory, unaware the mouse has survived and followed them. Witnessing their sorry state, the mouse takes pity on the brothers and decides to help them out. The mouse does this by activating the factory's machinery and dropping a large slice of cheese from a wheel into the wax-fiber boiler, producing a ball of string cheese, which the brothers discover. Inspired, the brothers end their war with the mouse and renovate the factory, retrofitting the entire factory to facilitate the manufacturing of cheese-based products. Lars runs the factory and entered a relationship with Hilde, Ernie took the position of his chef, and the mouse as their quality control taste-tester for new cheese combinations.

• Nathan Lane as Ernie Smuntz, a chef
• Lee Evans as Lars Smuntz, the heir to a string factory
• Maury Chaykin as Alexander Falko, a wealthy LaRue collector
• Christopher Walken as Caesar, an odd and eccentric exterminator hired by the Smuntz brothers to rid them of the mouse
• Vicki Lewis as April Smuntz, Lars' money-hungry wife
• William Hickey as Rudolf Smuntz, a string magnate and the late father of Ernie and Lars
• Eric Christmas as Ernie and Lars' lawyer
• Michael Jeter as Quincy Thorpe, a LaRue historian
• Cliff Emmich as Mayor McKrinkle
• Debra Christofferson as Ingrid
• Camilla Søeberg as Hilde
• Ian Abercrombie as the auctioneer
• Annabelle Gurwitch as Roxanne Atkins, a photographer
• Eric Poppick as Theodore Plumb, the banker
• Ernie Sabella as Maury, a worker at the cat shelter

Mouse Hunt was released in North America on December 19, 1997, then in the United Kingdom on April 3, 1998.[1]

Mouse Hunt received mixed reviews from film critics. Rotten Tomatoes reports that 42% of 31 critics had given the film a positive review. The critic consensus reads: "Mouse Hunt gets trapped under the weight of its excessive slapstick antics."[6] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale. Roger Ebert gave the film two stars, calling it "not very funny, and maybe couldn't have been very funny no matter what, because the pieces for comedy are not in place... A comedy that hasn't assigned sympathy to some characters and made others hateful cannot expect to get many laughs, because the audience doesn't know who to laugh at, or with." Though partner Gene Siskel liked the film.

Regarding the digital special effects, Ebert deemed the film "an excellent example of the way modern advances in special effects can sabotage a picture (Titanic is an example of effects being used wisely). Because it is possible to make a movie in which the mouse can do all sorts of clever things, the filmmakers have assumed incorrectly that it would be funny to see the mouse doing them."[7]

Nonetheless, the film was a financial success. It was released on December 19, 1997, opening in North America at #4 and grossing $6,062,922 in its opening weekend, averaging about $2,817 from 2,152 theaters. In its second weekend, it stayed at #4 and increased by 60 percent, making $9,702,770, averaging about $4,428 from 2,191 theaters, and bringing its ten-day gross to $21,505,569.[8] It closed on July 1, 1998, with a final gross of $61,917,389 in the North American market and $60,500,000 in other territories for a worldwide total of $122,417,389. Its budget was $38 million. The film was released in the United Kingdom on April 3, 1998, and opened at #2, behind Titanic.[9]

• Cinema of the United States
• List of American films of 1997

Wikiquote has quotations related to: MouseHunt (film)

• Mouse Hunt at IMDb
• Mouse Hunt at AllMovie
• Mouse Hunt at the TCM Movie Database
• Mouse Hunt at the American Film Institute Catalog
• Mouse Hunt at Box Office Mojo
• Mouse Hunt at Rotten Tomatoes