Fun Size

I didn't expect this to be a great movie. I figured it was just a fun chance to throw Victoria Justice some support and see her on the big screen, unfortunately it may be our only chance. To my gleeful surprise, it was a really good movie. It was less a kids movie than it was a zany teen comedy, full of naughty jokes and snarky humor, much more mature than I was expecting and I loved it for that.

Fun Size isn't a groundbreaking classic like Mean Girls or The Breakfast Club. But it is a solid, very funny and very watchable film, with an exciting story and some decent drama to boot. I enjoyed the Halloween setting (although they could have milked it more), and I love how almost every character's individual story sort of criss-crossed at the party. In that aspect it almost felt like a teen comedy version of Trick 'r Treat.

The fact that one of the main characters has two moms (i.e. gaaaaaay) who are featured prominently is reason enough alone for me to like this film. The fact that one of the boys raises his hand when the hot popular guy asks who wants to kiss him was icing on the cake.

This story was full of "adult children" so it was perfect for me. It almost seemed like there might be a deeper theme here, about growing up, although I couldn't really find an appropriate angle to equate Vic's crazy teenage adventure with the coming of age story all the adult characters went through (other than maybe her realization about what constitutes real romance). The mom's obsession with staying young was just depressing, but the convenience store clerk who had no friends was awesome. When he finds out that the hip girls at the party had been hanging out with Albert too, he delivers one of the films best lines: "See, it's not like I hang out with lame eight-year-olds!"

Victoria was, of course, very good. It was also a nice surprise to see Jane Levy (of ABC's Suburgatory) with such a key role. While Suburgatory isn't as good as MTV's Awkward, it's about as good as the 'network' sitcoms can get these days, and Levy's charisma is the show's best asset. She plays an obliteratingly different character in Fun Size, and thus gets a chance to prove her chops.

I had heard nothing but bad things about Fun Size. But I think the negative reception results from a cocktail of reasons, most of which have nothing to do with the actual film. Firstly, the film was promoted wrongly. It was billed as a kids film when the humor of the film is about 90% adult. Unambiguously raunchy jokes, deadpan sarcasm, self-deprecation and even a little politics makes up the majority of the film's jokes. This movie is more akin to Dude Where's My Car or Super Bad than it is to Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer. But there's also that 1/10th that consists of fart jokes and physical gags. And that's the second reason Fun Size had the cards stacked against it, the filmmakers don't seem quite sure whether they want this film to be Super Bad or Judy Moody. It could have been a great film by skewing in either direction, more family-friendly or as a "hard" PG-13. But instead they tow the middle line and as such the film has had a very hard time finding the right audience.

The final reason, live action children's movies are rarely ever given the fanfare they rightly deserve, while equally generic animated films get 100% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and are called universal, ageless, brilliant... I suspect the culprit here is that adults intuitively connect childhood with fantasy, so personified inanimate objects and pixelized characters effortlessly hit home, while anything depicting a flesh-and-blood vision of youth is seen as inherently juvenile. It's ironic, because animation's target audience skews younger, which means that live action kids films are often allowed to delve into deeper issues than their animated counterparts. Mind you, there are animated kids films which are indeed staggeringly brilliant. But there are, too, live action kids films which are equally brilliant, and half as praised. Fun Size is *not* one of those films, it's not brilliant, it's merely good. But suffice to say that if this were an animated film I assure you it would garner better critical reviews from the adults upstairs.