Little Man (2006)

Little Man arrives from 2006 with the confidence of a film that has nothing on its mind and no intention of acquiring anything. Calvin Simms, a jewel thief of short stature, hides a stolen diamond in a woman's purse, then disguises himself as an infant and installs himself in her household to retrieve it. The mechanics of the production deserve their own paragraph, since they involve a nine-year-old actor performing the role on set with his body painted brown while Marlon Wayans' head was later grafted on in post. The result is a visual effect that a defense attorney in an unrelated criminal trial once called convincing. We may take his word for it.

On the ledger of contemporary social consciousness, the film posts a row of zeros. The ensemble is largely Black, but the film treats this as the ordinary fact of a Wayans production, not as a statement. No character wrestles with identity, no system is indicted, no climate is mourned, no fortune is redistributed. The comedy aims low and hits lower, and its targets are the usual ones: a man in a diaper, a gullible husband, a grandfather whose suspicions nobody credits. There is no sermon here, which is the film's only discipline.

Body positivity is where the film goes into debt. Its entire premise is that a little person is funny because he is small enough to pass as an infant, and the joke never once looks for another angle. A character with an intellectual disability is played for laughs, the wife exists to want a child, and the mobsters exist to be punched. Three Golden Raspberry Awards followed, including Worst Remake or Rip-off, for a premise lifted from a 1954 Bugs Bunny cartoon. That is the film's true lineage: not a message, just a gag, stretched past all endurance. Zero across the board, and for once, no argument.