Zoom (2006)

There is a recurring type of film that arrives in the mid-2000s, adapted from a children's book nobody read, starring a comedian whose powers were already fading, and directed with the enthusiasm of a man fulfilling a contractual obligation. Zoom is that film. Tim Allen plays Jack Shepard, a washed-up superhero summoned from his auto shop to train four gifted youths against a returning threat. It earned twelve and a half million dollars against a seventy-five million dollar budget. The Razzies came calling. The culture has not called since.

For the purposes of classification, the cupboard is bare. The cast is white, the teenagers are pulled from the standard teen-movie bins, and nobody involved appears to have received a memo about representation. There is no romantic subtext of any stripe, no gender politics, no engagement with race, no environmental anxiety. The villain is a man who went mad from radiation, not from capitalism. The moral, delivered with the softness of a bedtime story, concerns teamwork, self-esteem, and believing in yourself, which the film treats as a gentle suggestion instead of a sermon. Tucker inflates. Cindy lifts heavy objects. Dylan sulks and then learns a thing called mindsight. That is the entire intellectual architecture.

What remains is a curio. The soundtrack leans heavily on Smash Mouth, which is its own kind of historical document. Tim Allen reportedly helped write a darker version and watched the studio sand it down into a family picture, and the seams show: a bitter protagonist, a dead brother, a government that intends to use children as bait, all wrapped in a bright bow and a Queen cover. We score it low and we move on. Some vintages are simply not worth the cellar space.