The Kid (2000)

Disney's The Kid arrives from the year 2000, a gentler era when a studio could hand Bruce Willis a midlife crisis and a small boy and call the result a fantasy comedy. Willis plays Russ Duritz, an image consultant so thoroughly unpleasant that his own eight-year-old self, played by Spencer Breslin, materializes to inform him he grew up to be a loser. The premise is sturdy enough. The execution is a milkshake with too much syrup, and the diner scene confirms it.

The supporting cast is competent and unremarked upon. Chi McBride and Juanita Moore appear in ordinary roles, present without ceremony, which is to say the film casts them and then declines to make a point of it. Emily Mortimer and Lily Tomlin are capable women orbiting a man's redemption arc, and the screenplay has no interest in interrogating that arrangement. There is no romantic or identity material beyond the heterosexual default, no environmental lament, no revisionist reading of 1968. The flashback to Rusty's eighth birthday is a private wound, not a historical corrective.

The film does possess, in abundance, a sermonizing streak. Every beat insists that Russ locate his inner child, embrace his abandoned dreams, and reconcile with a father who shouted at him in a hallway. Todd McCarthy found it insufferably cloying, and the assessment holds up. The protagonist's profession is offered as a hollow pursuit, though the screenplay locates the problem in his heart, not in the economy. Young Rusty is chubby and self-conscious, and the writing treats this as a matter of feeling, never of politics. The result is a picture that preaches without a doctrine, sentimental to its bones, and largely innocent of the cultural currents that would later demand a syllabus.