Director: Rob Reiner
Cast: Elijah Wood, Jon Lovitz, Jason Alexander, Alan Arkin*
Have I Seen It Before: No. Sufficiently (perhaps justifiably) torpedoed upon release, the film simply didn’t have the ubiquity for we elder millennials to be watched, despite what Siskel and Ebert had to tell us.
I have seen the episode of Siskel & Ebert where they reviewed the film a handful of times.
Did I Like It: There’s a hope about the truly reviled films that if I were to view them, I would find the correct way to view it. I’d be the one that finally got what Reiner et. al were trying to do.
No such luck.
A story about a ten year old boy who—in the long line of films released in the period that I suspect Macaulay Culkin’s people turned down—masters something with which even adults struggle would, on spec, have at least some kind of charm.
It almost reaches that minimal point of joy, but never quite gets running. Unfortunately, Reiner and author/screenwriter Alan Zweibel have no ear for being a kid in the 1990s. Everything about this reads as someone in their 40s living in Brentwood trying to imitate the noises of a kid in the 1990s.
That would have yielded a movie with a discordant note about it, but unfortunately most of what isn’t North’s (Wood) inner life plays like the wheezing desperation of a Borscht Belt comic fifteen seconds away from the end of his career. Eskimos, Hawaiians, and a brief hit with the cast of Witness (1985). No one is safe from the most basic of potshots.
If those potshots were funny, then maybe I could take it all in as a guilty pleasure. Unfortunately, the only effective laugh is when one of the telephone operators answering questions about North says, without any additional context, “Don’t even get him started on the Warren Commission.”
All right, maybe Zweibel and and Reiner had one insight into the interior life of this ten-old-boy in 1994. Not enough to support an entire film, but they definitely got me there.
*Truly one of the more difficult movies to come up with a top cast. Willis should probably be in that top 4, right? It does make for a good hub to play variations of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.