Willis adrift in forced whimsy

DISNEY'S THE KID (2000)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Bruce Willis is an admirable and occasional risk-taker, choosing roles that range from comedy to drama to action-adventure vehicles. But maybe an overly cute and highly overdone movie like "Disney's The Kid" is not what I would expect from him or any actor. It is what I call "forced whimsy."

I am a sucker for whimsical fantasies but this one is extremely demanding on my whimsy tolerance meter. Willis is Russell Duritz (see if you can remember that name), a 40-year-old image consultant who has no wife, no family and no dog. Oh, what a shame. He is cold, cynical and only gets three hours of sleep a night. Russell is rude to his overworked assistant (Lily Tomlin, shrewdly cast), calling her at obsessively late night hours to complain about his house's supposedly faulty security system! The reason is because some kid has been in his house. Who is this kid? None other than Russell as a young eight-year-old Rusty (overplayed by Spencer Breslin, and that includes his crying fits).

The question remains: why does the kid chase him in the opening scenes of the film in a cargo plane? No idea, but I went along with the movie's concept. Can Russell really see the kid or is all this in his mind? Paging the Sixth Sense. All I can say is that the movie boils it down to one odd conceit: if the young Russell had taken charge and won in a schoolyard fistfight, he might have grown up to be a well-rounded family man and settled with Emily Mortimer, who plays his on/off again girlfriend. The eight-year-old Rusty calls his future adult self a loser. How dare he?

I will not say I hated "Disney's The Kid" (the title was changed from "The Kid" to "Disney's The Kid" to avoid confusion with the Charlie Chaplin classic) but the movie overplays its hand. The sentimental and highly manipulative music score would make even Steven Spielberg and his composer John Williams cringe. Willis is adrift and looks lost, which may be the idea, but the movie never gives us a chance to see much more than Willis having a facial tic. The kid is all wrong for the film, looking like a mature version of  Jeff Cohen's "Chunk" character from "The Goonies" (Yes, I went there). I appreciate the ideas in the film but I think it could've been a funnier and more complex picture had it focused on the insights into a 40-year-old man's emotional problems that did not exclusively center on a childhood fight and not owning a dog.