Disney's The Kid Reviewed

ROVIN' AND RAVIN' WITH MIKE

Kiddie Corn

Disney’s The Kid

About twenty years ago, sometime seminarian, sometime alcoholic John Bradshaw began exhorting us to find our inner children. What started off as a minor New Age annoyance soon became a major industry, with Bradshaw’s harangues replayed at every PBS fund-raising drive. Since they took their place right alongside the golden-oldies rock concerts, its pretty obvious who Bradshaw’s most responsive audience was—people who have spent so much time getting and spending that along the way they’ve forgotten to goof off. In other words, yuppies.

Now, some twenty years later—just about the usual period of time that Disney enterprises lag behind the culture—the whole Brad-shavian rap comes to a kind of life even creepier than the dead people with whom Bruce Willis shared his last weird kid flick, The Sixth Sense. The official title of the new effort, Disney’s The Kid, is the giveaway.

We are very much in Disney land here, even if the film opens rather far from the squeaky suburban America of Mickey and Donald. Instead, Russell Duritz (Willis), poster-boy for no longer young yuppies, lives and seems to be dying in L.A., peddling phony images for people who aren’t much more than image, selves in search of self-esteem rather than anyone to esteem them.

Suddenly, Rusty (Spencer Breslin) happens. Russell’s no longer inner child harangues him (self?—the pronouns get as confusing as they did in the review of Me, Myself, and Irene), declaring that growing up to be neither married nor owning a dog, he has become (will become?) a loser. Neither of them (him?) catches on to why Rusty has traveled into Russell’s life. But, hey, this is a feel-good flick, and one thing you can feel good about is that you are smarter than the guys on the screen.

Don’t even bother about the women, girlfriend with the emphasis on friend (Emily Mortimer) and assistant (Lily Tomlin, what a waste). It seems that the women in Disney’s animated films have more dimension than these real women do.

OK, enough suspense. I didn’t expect to like The Kid, but I did give it every opportunity, and I have to admit, there is a certain charm to it. It even made me think about a what-if scenario for myself. It gave me the opportunity once again to be amazed that Bruce Willis has become one of our best and most consistent actors. But, this film is too predictable. By the end, it is smothering itself in a sloppy hug, and if your hair is the right length (this is a Disney film), you can get hugged, too. Trying to be too warm, director Turteltaub and script-writer Wells get a little too fuzzy along the way. Even a film like My Dog Skip, which casts the golden glow of memory (not to mention the honeysuckle tones of narration) on childhood gave us a less sentimental view of our own Rusties.

And, a note to parents, despite its title, the kids who made up a large part of the audience when I saw this film did not appreciate it. Bogging down in a lot of wordiness and uncertainty, the film left some of these film-reviewer wannabes delivering their most damning critique: boring! So, this is not one of those movies for kids of all ages. No, it is a film for kids over thirty.

I’ve been asked several times if I have ever seen a film that I simply do not feel capable of writing a review of. The answer is, yes, and it happened again recently when I went to see Scary Movie. Director Keenen Ivory Wayans and his brothers and scriptwriters Shawn Wayans and Marlon Wayans have concocted a parody of the teenage slasher films that have become popular in recent years—and that I have avoided.

There are some parodies, Don Quixote being the best known, that transcend the material they are parodying. We can appreciate them even if we are not familiar with their targets. Scary Movie is not such a thing, I am afraid. Judging from the response of the young audience with which I saw this film, I just did not get a lot of the jokes. It would be as unfair for me to try to review Scary Movie as it would be for me to try to review an Iranian film without subtitles.

There is one scene that is very much in my language and, since it takes place at the movies, is very much in my territory. A woman (Regina Hall) goes to see Shakespeare in Love, armed with not only a cell phone but also a video camera, and is loudly generous with her commentary on the film. If you think this is an exaggeration, you need to quit renting videos and take your chances at the megaplex with the rest of us.

You can catch up on the latest on John Bradshaw, the granddaddy of all inner kids. H. Arthur Taussig maintains the Family Values Parent’s Guide to the content of films. His report on Disney’s The Kid is a good example of his work, which I am sure many parents will find of use.

Keep your feet dry and your heart full of noble thoughts, and if your inner brat feels like skipping, I really don’t care, just so long as he doesn’t throw popcorn, as several external kids did during the showing of The Kid that I caught. In fact, one of the unsung heroes of the American film industry, the folks who clean up the theaters between shows, remarked afterward that kids don’t want to eat popcorn. They just want popcorn. And, added his coworker, they want to throw popcorn. And, although I’m not exactly throwing brickbats at The Kid, it is a film that the kids throw a lot of popcorn at.