HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS
A film review by Greg Goebel
Copyright 1989 Greg Goebel
I spent the entire Spring waiting for the blockbuster Summer, but after the first month of it I feel like I've been blockbustered once (or twice) too many. INDIANA JONES! (A crisp production of more of the same of what never did a lot for me in the first place.) STAR TREK V! (Aren't you folks getting a little old for this sort of thing?) GHOSTBUSTERS II! (An amiable curtain call.) BATMAN! (Like DUNE: somewhere in this darkness there is a great movie, trying to escape but lost and confused.)
I feel like Morris the cat: Hollywood dishes out its treasures to please me and I stifle a yawn -- ungrateful, jaded, and spoiled wretch that I am. (I couldn't even have the satisfaction of reviewing these movies, since everyone is going to see them anyway and all I would accomplish by writing reviews is to enmesh myself in time-consuming arguments.)
But maybe I'm not so jaded after all. Maybe way down deep I still am that little kid, holding his mother's hand as he walks into a movie house (in the days when theatres had only one screen and almost always ran double features) to watch an absent-minded professor floating through the moonlit sky in a Model T that went faintly "glub, glub, glub." Why do I think this? Because of Disney's latest effort: HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS.
Absent-minded professor Wayne Stylinski (Rick Moranis) is working in his attic on a device to shrink things down to microscopic size. Unfortunately, his single-minded attention to his work is causing family strains: his wife spent the night at her mother's, and his two kids -- pretty teen-aged Amy and her genius kid brother Nick -- are a little worried.
Stylinski's next door neighbor, Big Russ Thompson -- who is still coasting on his past glories as the supreme jock in his high school class -- thinks Stylinski is pretty strange, but he has other worries: Why is his lackluster teenage son, little Russ, so indifferent to football and fishing and all the other measures of true manhood? (Brings back memories.) After all, his younger son, Ron, is keen on sports! Why, just watch Ron go into the back yard with a bat and ball to knock around a little ... though his aim is a little lousy, since the ball goes through the Stylinski's attic window ... where it activates the unattended shrinking machine ... which sweeps back and forth and waits, patiently, menacingly, for someone to walk through the door....
Okay, you know what happens next. And since you do, the question comes up: why bother to see this film?
BECAUSE IT'S A LOT OF FUN!
Yes, it's a familiar recipe, but even the oldest recipe is tasty if prepared with the proper attention to the fine details. The script is neat, and so is the acting (thank God, for once Rick Moranis is not playing a moping super-nerd), the action moves along nicely, the extensive special effects range from acceptable to downright impressive ... and even the Stylinski's obligatory cute little dog, Corky, is adept in his role.
Most pleasant is how this film takes an old Disney format and brings it up to date with little awkwardness. Spielberg stole the Disney format and populated it with gimmicks and widgets; in HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS Disney steals that infatuation with gadgets in turn and manages to use it with more wit and cleverness than Spielberg can normally manage. The parents are modern parents -- I couldn't imagine watching a mom in Walt's lifetime realizing that her pretty teenage girl is lost along with a flakey teenage boy and muttering in apprehension: "They *better* behave themselves!"
There are so many other deft touches; subtle jokes like the endless stream of junk Big Russ loads into his RV as he's preparing to take his family to "rough it," or the strange way that whatever happens to little Nick, his big four-eyes glasses make it without a scratch. One of the fine delights is the soundtrack, which has that precise timing and calculation of the soundtracks to the best Warner Brothers cartoons (and which in fact steals its main theme from those soundtracks). Even the opening credits are a pleasure, framed by a little cartoon that draws deeply from the best animation of the Fifties.
Given all this praise, you might think I'm saying that this film is the greatest thing in entertainment since the Walkman, but that would be going way too far. This is a little, corny, fairy-cake movie, not far removed from a Disney Sunday Movie, based on an old format, built on a familiar premise; what makes it work is that almost everything in it is done *right* -- and that fact is the greatest pleasure in the entire thing. Take the kids; if you're a big kid -- go yourself.
Oh, almost forgot -- HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS is preceded by a new Maroon Cartoon: Roger Rabbit, Baby Herman, and Veronica in "Tummy Trouble." They *do* make them like they used to -- thank God!
[<>] gvg
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