FilmJudge - Little Man

REVIEW

Little Man
2006
Certificate: 12 | Runtime: 90 | Director: Keenen Ivory Wayans
Starring: Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Kerry Washington

When a couple of jewel thieves hide their stash in Vanessa's (Washington) handbag, they hatch a scheme to get it back. Calvin (Marlon Mayans) is a midget so he disguises himself as a baby and leaves himself on the her doorstep. He is taken in by Vanessa and her husband Darryl (Shawn Wayans), who try to raise Calvin as their son.

Okay, I wasn't exactly expecting Little Man to be any good, but knowing that being kicked in the nuts hurts a lot doesn't make it any less painful if it happens to you. And speaking of which, injury to the groin is pretty much the highest level of humour you can expect from Little Man - I think there are at least 15 instances of it.

Little Man is perhaps the finest example to date of the Wayans brothers being lazy. I don't actually think they're bad comedy writers; Scary Movie was great fun (although the sequel was awful), and their earlier films like Don't Be a Menace and I'm Gonna Git You Sucka are rather underrated. But every single thing about Little Man seems tired and forced. It's almost as though they just decided on the premise (midget pretends to be a baby), and tried to milk as much as they could from it, regardless of whether it was funny or even made sense.

Nearly ever single joke in Little Man is supposed to come from the fact that nobody realises Calvin is an adult. Unfortunately, you'd have to be unbelievably stupid not to notice, because the things he does are just too extreme. These include fondling a friend of the couple who take him in, and apparently having sex with his adoptive mother. Despite the utter craziness of the premise, things like this just take the idea that nobody knows too far. The rest of the humour is supposed to come from endless groin injury and bowel jokes, and many of them aren't even new ideas. Believe it or not, I can still laugh at a man being hit in the nuts, but jokes like this need to be done in original ways or they just seem tired.

There's also no denying that Calvin actually looks pretty creepy. The effect of putting Marlon's face onto the body of a toddler or midget is reasonably well done, but it still doesn't look right. It doesn't help that he contorts his face and overacts as much as he can, and this further adds to the implausibility that nobody would notice something wasn't right about the kid.

There's nothing positive to say about most of the other performances either. Shawn tries to play the straight man to Marlon, but he just looks bored and comes across as stupid. Washington just looks uncomfortable, and she's not a natural comedienne either. In fact, the only performance that raised a smile was that of sitcom veteran Fred Stoller, whose nasal voice and paranoid behaviour is much funnier than anything Calvin gets up to. John Witherspoon, playing Vanessa's father is also decent value, but he just isn't in the film enough.

There's nothing wrong with comedies being silly; Dodgeball is silly, Dumb & Dumber is silly, but crucially their sillyness is employed to make them into funny films. Little Man started off as a stupid and moronic concept, and then the Wayans tried to build a funny film around it. Little Man sits alongside Date Movie as one of the worst comedies of the year, and in a particularly poor year for comedy, that's saying something.

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