A VERY FORTUNATE EVENT.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

'LEMONY SNICKET'S A Series of Unfortunate Events'' has wit to burn. Practically every performance, Rick Heinrichs' gothically grubby production design and the overriding, tongue-in-cheek attitude of the movie make up for any lapses in pacing and appropriateness for tiny tots the cartoonishly demented production might suffer. Of course, you'll also have to be tolerant of both Jim Carrey and Meryl Streep taking it way over the top. But in their extremely different ways, the polar-opposite actors stretch their skills here - he exploring the outer limits of archness, she still maintaining some kind of emotional truth in a caricature - and rarely go for the easiest laughs.

Besides, you've gotta like a movie in which even these two performing powerhouses are constantly upstaged by a baby. For those unfamiliar with Daniel Handler's best-selling source books, Lemony Snicket is the ironic, pessimistic narrator (well-voiced in the movie, in shadowed silhouette, by Jude Law) of the trials and temporary triumphs of the Baudelaire children: prepubescent Violet, who is good at devising things; the slightly younger Klaus (Liam Aiken), who's read everything and retained it all; and the big-on-biting toddler Sunny (Kara and Shelby Hoffman).

In the film's deftest comic ploy, Sunny constantly makes snide comments in baby jabber that only Klaus and Violet understand, and are translated for the rest of us in subtitles. The looks on the imp's face tell us all the rest we need to know. A combination of the first three Snicket books ``The Bad Beginning,'' ``The Reptile Room'' and ``The Wide Window,'' the movie tells of how the Baudelaires' parents were killed in a suspicious house fire, leaving them in the custody of a relative they never knew existed, Carrey's Count Olaf. A rotten actor and pretentious to boot, Olaf has bad hair and teeth, wears a hair-encrusted day coat and lives in a filthy mansion. He quickly turns the children into Dickensian drudges, while all the time scheming to get his hands on their inheritance money.

This means baroque attempts to off the Baudelaires - when in doubt, director Brad Silberling (``Casper'') throws in a railroad crossing cliffhanger - and, in Violet's case, a fate worse than death. But the Baudelaires keep managing to escape Olaf's clutches. They hook up with more agreeable guardians - Billy Connolly's Uncle Monty, whose home is filled with interesting reptiles, and Streep's Josephine, a dithering paranoid who, despite worrying about everything, lives in a stilt house that juts over storm-ravaged Lake Lachrymose.

Olaf, however, keeps coming after them in disguises that the children see right through but, somehow, fool all of the adults who should be protecting them. And that's where Browning and Aiken, the best kind of young movie actors, hold the movie together by keeping straight faces and their emotions in check.

Some have complained that the two older Baudelaires should exhibit more grief or fear, but that misses the whole point of the piece. The kids are supposed to be smarter and more mature than the childishly vamping, emotionally needy Carrey, Streep and other full-grown characters. It's what makes the Lemony Snicket universe such subversive fun.

Browning and Aiken's deadpan reactions to traumatizing circumstances have a humor all their own that plays nicely against the broader wackiness the film indulges. Most of which is more sophisticated than that in your average family funfest, by the way.

Indulgent as it sometimes gets, at least ``Unfortunate Events'' doesn't traffic in crotch kicks and flatulence jokes. That alone makes this bizarro- world comedy of fears suitable viewing for every youngster on the planet.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

LEMONY SNICKET'S A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS - Three stars

(PG: violence, children in jeopardy)

Starring: Jim Carrey, Liam Aiken, Emily Browning, Kara and Shelby Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Jude Law, Billy Connolly.

Director: Brad Silberling.

Running time: 1 hr. 45 min.

Playing: In wide release.

In a nutshell: Big on production design and Carrey amusing himself, this adaptation of the slightly horrific children's books should be fun enough for most kids and just bent enough to sustain adult interest.

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Count Olaf (Jim Carrey), the Beaudelaire children's greedy guardian, is no match for the clever orphans in ``Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events.''