Little Man

It doesn't take a lot to be seen as a hero in someone else's eyes. For example, if anyone attending a showing of Little Man were to walk out of the theater before it was over, he or she would automatically become my personal hero. Unfortunately, there were no such acts of heroism at my showing. And since it was my duty to review it, I had to sit through every last minute. Director Keenan Ivory Wayans (White Chicks, Scary Movie 1 and 2) has crafted a film so misguided and just plain odd, I almost wonder if this wasn't some sort of experiment that the filmmakers were trying to perform in order to see how the audience would react. More frightening and disturbing than any horror film to hit the big screen this year so far, Little Man almost makes me nostalgic for Martin Short's infamous "grown man posing as a little kid" comedy, Clifford.

Mere moments after being released from prison, pint-sized con artist Calvin (Marlon Wayans) is already on his next job. With the help of his slow-witted partner in crime, Percy (Tracy Morgan), Calvin steals a valuable diamond right out of a jewelry store without anyone noticing at first. The cops are eventually able to catch on, and during a hot pursuit, Calvin is forced to dispose of the diamond in the purse of local woman Vanessa (Kerry Washington), and her devoted husband Darryl (Shawn Wayans). Calvin and Percy follow the couple to their home, and overhear that the pair wish for a baby, but because of Vanessa's recent promotion and busy work schedule, they don't have the time. Percy hatches a bizarre scheme where the vertically challenged Calvin will pose as an abandoned toddler, so he can gain entrance into the house, and steal the diamond.

What starts as a simple in and out job quickly turns more complicated when Calvin finds the young couple actually falling for him, and welcoming him into their lives. He even finds himself slowly getting used to the loving family life that he never had. However, danger is lurking nearby, as Calvin's crime boss (Chazz Palminteri), who instructed him to get the diamond in the first place, is starting to grow impatient. If Calvin doesn't retrieve the diamond soon without blowing his disguise, the family may be in bigger danger when his boss' thugs start following them.

A blatant rip off of a classic Bugs Bunny short with a similar premise, in which the toon rabbit adopted a notorious thief posing as a baby (so blatant the movie even literally plagiarizes entire scenes from the cartoon, right down to the dialogue and gags), Little Man is an uncomfortable mix of the usual Wayans-style raunch humor, Home Alone slapstick, and heart-tugging sentiment. It is a 98 minute long cinematic black hole in which all ideas, humor, and creativity that might have gone into the making of this movie are sucked into a deep swirling vortex. We watch scene after scene struggle for laughs up there on the screen, but we don't, because we wonder why we're supposed to find this funny in the first place. There is nothing funny about Little Man. Its main joke is that comic actor Marlon Wayans is doing a terrible imitation of a toddler, and for some reason, absolutely everybody except for one character falls for it the moment they lay eyes on him. Never mind the fact that Marlon Wayans as a toddler makes Martin Lawrence in Big Momma's House look down right convincing, or the fact that the questionable special effects often make it look like they crudely pasted Marlon Wayans' face over the head of a midget actor. The whole idea itself is just creepy, and seeing Marlon Wayans posing as a 2-year-old comes across more as frightening than funny. (Especially when he makes leering faces at women, or mugs at the camera with this hideous smile that he keeps on repeating.)

When the movie's not asking us to laugh at the frightening image of the Calvin character, it tries to make us laugh at over the top gross out humor that has no place being in a PG-13 movie. While Calvin is lying in the baby basket, waiting for the couple to answer the door, a dog walks up to him and we get a graphic close up of Calvin having urine sprayed over his face and in his mouth. No reason for this gag, the Wayans just had to throw a bathroom joke in there. Later scenes include a shockingly appalling scene where a woman tries to breast-feed Calvin, and let's not forget the moment where little Calvin adds some extra "flavor" to a man's cookie by rubbing it all over his private areas. Besides that, the movie's humor is juvenile at best, where people are hit in the crotch repeatedly by just about every projectile object imaginable, or hit in the head in lame slapstick sequences that almost play like a bad In Living Color parody of Home Alone. The movie has no coherency or plot structure. It's simply a series of tired gags strung together loosely to make a movie.

Because the movie is too busy concentrating on unfunny sight gags, the characters and the actors themselves are pretty much given absolutely nothing to do. But then, if everyone in this movie is dumb enough to believe Calvin is an actual toddler, maybe we're better off not knowing much about them, as I imagine they probably need directions to get dressed in the morning. Marlon Wayans simply makes funny faces for the duration of his screen time, none of which are remotely amusing. Shawn Wayans and Kerry Washington are restricted to bland straight man roles, the movie denying them even the slightest attempt at doing something funny with their characters. The cast also includes some cameos by other comedians such as Rob Schneider and Molly Shannon, who are both immediately forgettable in their respective roles as a Barney the Dinosaur-like character and a deranged soccer mom.

Little Man is one of those movies that looks bad from the trailers, and manages to somehow exceed your worst nightmares. It is an ugly, stupid farce that also finds time to be racist in the form of a pair of white cops who like to beat up on random black people. It seems that Keenan Ivory, Marlon, and Shawn Wayans (who also wrote the screenplay) ran out of inspiration before they even typed a single letter into the script. (Then again, when your inspiration is "let's steal the plot of an old Bugs Bunny cartoon, and add toilet humor to it", there's not much to work with.) Idiotic and downright terrifying in its ineptness, this is a movie that should have never gone before the camera, let alone been greenlighted in the first place. Little Man fails in just about every conceivable way.

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