Dennis the Menace (1993)

Few artifacts of the 1993 summer season arrive with less ideological freight than this one. Nick Castle directs John Hughes's script, which lifts the Home Alone chassis wholesale and parks it in a sunlit suburb where a five-year-old named Dennis Mitchell torments Walter Matthau's George Wilson with slingshots, dentures, and a garden club's rare orchid. The film wants nothing more than to be a comic strip that moves. It succeeds at that modest ambition and little else.

Two adults here hold jobs, and a daycare center gets a mention in the closing minutes. Those details function as set dressing, not argument. The lone Black character, Chief Bennett, played by Paul Winfield, exists to warn a drifter out of town and later to slam a car door on a hand. The film declines to notice his race, and he declines to make anything of it. Nobody in this story is asked to represent a demographic, correct an injustice, or confront a structure. Christopher Lloyd's Switchblade Sam is simply a burglar, and the film treats him as one, which is its own kind of old-fashioned efficiency. The burglary is slapstick. The marriage is stable. The villain is wicked because he steals coins.

Assessed against the anxieties of a later decade, the picture registers as a sealed environment. It is a comic strip adaptation, mechanical in its gags and pleasant in its pacing, and it carries no thesis beyond the notion that children are exhausting and orchids bloom but once. Matthau mutters. Gamble grins. The credits roll. There are worse ways to spend ninety-six minutes, and few more innocent ones. A sommelier of such vintages would call this a clean pour, unremarkable and free of sediment, and would move on to the next bottle without further comment. So shall we all.

The film performed well, spawned two direct-to-video sequels, and remains precisely what it was built to be: a Hughes-produced babysitting device that asks nothing of its audience and offers nothing in return but a slingshot and a flaming marshmallow. There is something almost restful in that. Almost nothing here can be catalogued as an argument, and after a long season of arguments, the silence is welcome. Dennis breaks a great deal of property. He does not break anyone's worldview. We should be grateful, and we are.