You wanna know what grinds my gears? Stuart Little. This awful idea started as a dumb book in the 1940s, and somehow Hollywood greased up its hands and wrote a screenplay for the repetitive rat. Then they did it two more times, each one worse than the last.

Stuart Little takes place within a family with a fitting adjective for a last name. The parents tell their son, who has been looking forward to having a sibling for a very long time, that they’re going to an adoption agency to get him one. When they arrive, they have a hard time deciding which kid to take, that is, until they find the rodent, Stuart. They adopt the mouse, and when they bring him home, their son isn realistically upset. The kid didn’t want a rat, but he has one now. Over the course of the movie he learns to love Stuart and they become one big happy Little family.

There are a lot of problems with the plot of the movie, for instance you have to go through a lot of hoops to adopt a kid. You can’t just walk in then out with a kid with no effort. It takes years to show that you are a responsible adult with the ability to care for children; they aren’t just convenience stores where you buy kids. Why would a human adoption agency even have an adoptable mouse anyway? Is that how they work in the universe?

The storyline refuses to explain even the simplest of concepts; the fact of human-to-mouse communication is a big one. I don’t mean how can Stuart talk, I mean how are the Littles able to hear him? Stuart is a teeny tiny little mouse, who shouldn’t be able to speak the human language in the first place. Even if he could, he would have to project his voice like crazy. Is he just constantly shouting?

The Littles also have a cat named Snowbell. While he can talk, only Stuart can understand him. This simply doesn’t make sense. The universe of this movie seems to make the rules up as it goes. A movie needs a set of rules that it can’t deviate from, and must obey. And if you’re going to have a talking animal in the movie, then you have to either explain why only that one can talk or have every animal talk. Later on, two more rats show up claiming to be Stuart’s parents, and everyone can understand them just fine. Is it just rodents that people can understand in this world?

Aside from talking, Stuart does a lot of questionable things in all of the movies (most likely due to his upbringing in a sketchy rodent-selling adoption agency). Why is he playing soccer? If he keeps playing, he will die. Not almost die, will die. Stuart comes close to his doom while he’s playing it, so why would they allow him to continue putting his tiny life in danger? Do the Littles just wanna see what this rat can take? Are they just a morbid family just waiting for this poor, defenseless mouse to get trampled to death?

Stuart, in all the movies, drives around in small remote control vehicles. How is he able to steer them while he’s in the cockpit? There are no pedals in remote control vehicles. There are no working steering wheels in remote control vehicles. Unless Stuart is an engineering rodent god, he probably does not have the ability or brain capacity to fix something up.

Stuart Little is a garbage idea, with a garbage execution, and garbage characters. He didn’t deserve one movie, let alone three. No stars for Stuart.