Problem Child (1990)

Problem Child arrives from 1990 with the confidence of a film that knows exactly what it is and has no interest in being anything better. Dennis Dugan's feature debut concerns Ben Healy, a decent man with a tyrannical father, a social-climbing wife, and an adopted seven-year-old who urinates on campfires and strikes opposing Little Leaguers in the groin with a bat. The screenwriters originally conceived a dark satire of the era's cute-kid-reforms-cynical-adult cycle. Universal demanded a children's film. The compromise satisfies neither impulse, which is presumably why seventy percent of the first test audience walked out.

The film's social consciousness is essentially nil, and it does not pretend otherwise. Flo, the wife, exists to be mocked for wanting things. The adoption agency is a joke about incompetence. The orphanage is a punchline. Race never enters the frame. Neither does queerness, environmental anxiety, body acceptance, or any awareness of neurological difference, despite the story's origin in a real case involving a child with severe behavioral issues and violent tendencies. That origin goes unexamined. Junior is simply a monster, until the third act decides he is a boy who wanted a father.

There is a faint flicker of class resentment in Big Ben, the sporting goods magnate running for mayor while selling the family estate to a Japanese conglomerate, but the film treats him as a character gag, not a system. No argument is made about wealth itself. The satire is aimed at one loud man, and the camera moves on. The result is a mean, chaotic, occasionally funny artifact of its moment, one that grossed seventy-two million dollars and spawned two sequels and an animated series. We classify it, file it, and move to the next shelf.