If you’re thinking of getting your children a lobotomy for Christmas, why not take them to see “Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium” instead? For the price of a single movie ticket you can destroy your wee one’s brain without all that messy surgery, leaving plenty of cash for your Christmas shopping. “Magorium” is a magical celebration of the wonder of make-believe, crafted with all the care and love you’d find in a sweatshop.

Mr. Magorium (Dustin Hoffman) is a delightful and mysterious old fellow who runs an enormous shop full of wonderful toys. After a long career, he’s getting ready to go on a magical journey (read: drop dead). This makes a lot of sense. His whimsical antics become exhausting after only 10 minutes and apparently he’s 243 years old — if I had to be Mr. Magorium for 243 years, I’d want to die, too. For some reason, Mr. Magorium’s store manager, Molly Mahoney (Natalie Portman), is upset by the news of her impending freedom, so she decides to show her boss that life is worth living after all. And, no, she doesn’t do this by taking her clothes off, you filthy-minded reader. Instead she takes him on an exciting, erotically symbolic adventure that involves the two of them talking to hotdog vendors and bouncing on mattresses.

No movie that champions originality would be complete without a cast crammed with two-dimensional stock characters, and “Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium” is nothing if not predictable. There’s 10-year-old Eric (Zach Mills) who hangs around the store, needs to learn self-confidence, and seems to be wearing a toupee made of black licorice. And there’s Jason Bateman as the accountant, Henry, who is hired to assess the value of the store before Mr. Magorium takes his dirt nap. Being an accountant, Henry is a dusty workaholic who doesn’t believe in magic, reminding the audience that for once it would be refreshing to see an onscreen accountant who was happy and full of life.

Writer-director Zach Helm (who scripted the terrific “Stranger Than Fiction”) seems to be the culprit in this plodding mess, although the production company, Walden Media, is fast making a career out of children’s movies that are as toxic to children as Chinese toys (see: “Hoot,” “Around the World in 80 Days,” “The Seeker: the Dark is Rising”).

Directors and screenwriters are sometimes accused of being on drugs if their flights of cinematic fancy become too imaginative, but ingesting Bindeez (labored explanation of joke: Bindeez are the GHB-coated children’s toys recently recalled in Australia) could have vastly improved “Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium.” It’s a movie celebrating the wonders of the imagination, made by people who possess zero imagination. Depressingly literal, the flick’s computer-generated special effects are not at all special — toy airplanes fly, wooden blocks spin, balls bounce — and they pale next to the occasional practical effect. The brief sequence in which Mr. Magorium dances on Bubble Wrap contains more originality and imagination than the rest of this movie (and its probable sequels) put together.

Maybe my standards are too high, but a fantasy movie aimed at children should fill their heads with images they’ve never seen before. The only image “Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium” generated in my mind was that of a bloated and unshaven Mr. Hoffman, staring at himself in the mirror and wondering if his soul will carbonize and crumble into black dust if he cashes the paycheck he got for this.