You remember the one. Tom Cruise is at the end of his tether and goes on an extended rant, which is either directed to, or in the presence of, the young kid played by Jonathan Lipnicki. During this rant he lets an f-bomb slip out. When he finally stops speaking, Lipnicki's Ray looks at him and says, in a shocked whisper, "You said 'fuck.'"
The moment makes you laugh because it's funny, but also because it discomfits you. The idea of an adult failing to sanitize his language in front of a child is funny, because we've all done it, in most cases by accident. (Or when you and your family almost get run over by a car that's driving on the bike path. Speaking from experience.) In the making of Jerry Maguire, they had to do it on purpose. Even if a child actor would tend to be less innocent than your average child, it still feels a little wanton. But it works and is memorable and I support it.
One of the reasons Little Monsters is a bad movie is that it repeatedly trammels on these decency standards, in situations that don't make you laugh, and never really had the hope of doing so.
On the surface, there is everything to like about this Australian zom-com, which played MIFF last year as the mid-festival showcase, and which stars the wonderful Lupita Nyong'o. She's not only wonderful in general, but she's lovely in this movie.
That's in direct contrast to her two adult co-stars, who take toxic masculinity to a particularly profane level.
The story involves a class of students who go to a zoo that's next to an American military site, where they are doing testing that results in the unleashing of zombies. The cheap pot shots the movie takes at Americans would be triggering enough to reduce the effectiveness of this movie for me, if I really cared about that sort of thing. (Especially nowadays, when we so richly deserve it).
Nyong'o's character is the class teacher, but she's not the movie's main character, all advertising to the contrary. It's a good 15 minutes before we meet her, because we have to spend the beginning of the movie on an extended montage of an angry break-up between Dave (Alexander England, who reminds me of Alfie Allen) and his girlfriend. Dave is the uncle of one of the kids in the class, Felix (Diesel La Torraca), and has to live with Felix and his mum (Dave's sister) after the break-up.
Dave is the good guy. We know this because we can tell that his transgressions are not disqualifying. He will learn to be a better guy over the course of the narrative. But among those transgressions is to repeatedly drop f-bombs in the presence of his nephew, who must be about six years old. Even if he's not accustomed to being around kids on a regular basis, and his life is in disarray, he puts very little effort into keeping his language clean. The patience of his sister is off the charts, especially when Dave takes the kid over to his girlfriend's house as part of a misguided marriage proposal in the middle of the night, and finds her shagging another guy.
But the coup de grace in terms of both casual torrents of profanity and American bashing comes in the form of the character played by Josh Gad. That's right, the guy who voices the snowman in the Frozen movies, who surely has enough money to avoid garbage like this.
Gad plays an American children's entertainer named Teddy McGiggle, who is performing at the zoo that day. If there's anything more tired than the idea that a children's entertainer is actually a foul-mouthed asshole, I don't know what it might be.
But this particular character is a caricature of even the most extreme characterizations of this type of character. (Once I used both "character" and "caricature" in that sentence I decided just to double down on the allieration.) Teddy McGiggle drops profanity not only casually, but in the extreme, even calling someone the c-word. He is dripping with unwarranted malevolence. He's also cowardly and sniveling. He double crosses people who have helped him for no greater reason than to make us more and more satisfied at the arrival of his inevitable demise at the hands of the zombies. After teaming up with one particular character to get to a vehicle that can help them all escape, he not only shuts himself up inside in order to escape alone, for no reason other than basic meanness, but he also gives the finger to the characters he abandoned outside.
Little Monsters did not need to make Teddy McGiggle so vile, and it did not need to expose the 15 to 20 children who acted in it to such repeated vileness. I know the c-word is used more casually in Australia than it is in the U.S., but just imagine being those actors' parents as they watched the movie and had to explain to their kids why a children's entertainer used that most gut-punchy and gender-specific of insults.
I'm not a prude, but if a movie is going to stomp all over such basic decency considerations, it has to do other things right. But the only thing it does right is present us with a very sweet Lupita Nyong'o in a yellow sundress. Everything else is hateful and tone deaf, and there's nothing even remotely clever about the zombie stuff, which may be the worst part of all.
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