First off, let me make one thing perfectly straight: the one reason I saw this movie was to experience the rarity of Ed O'Neill in a leading role. I've watched Married With Children every chance I got the last 3-4 years, and ever since the first episode I saw, I wanted to see O'Neill in other roles, preferably in films. That's why I saw The Bone Collector, it's why I saw K9 and it's why I, against better judgment, saw this movie. OK, now that I've got that out of the way, let me make a point out of the fact that I really, really don't care for children's films. Yes, yes, I know, this is a "family film"... but that's really semantics, now isn't it? The reason the movie was made so kiddie-like wasn't to make it possible to show it to 'families', it was to make it acceptable viewing material for children. Face it, this is the kind of film that the parents rent for the kids if they want to have a night out or they just want to make absolutely sure that they won't be bothered by them for the next two hours or so. This really isn't that attractive a film choice for anyone over the age of 10. Apart from that, honestly, it's not all bad. Sure, it's a typical, predictable underdog tale glorifying one of the worlds most violent, ridiculous sports, but it's not entirely bad, and at least it's not another dreaded "kids taking care of the adults' problems" children's film. The plot is not the least bit original, but it's not bad. There seemed to be too many undeveloped subplots, though. The pacing is pretty good, despite my inherent hatred of kiddie flicks, I was rarely bored. The acting is mostly bad, but that's probably because it's a minor kids flick where most of the characters are children. O'Neill and Moranis are good, as are most of the other adults in the film. The humor is mostly juvenile and childish, but this is a children's film, so it's not like that's a big surprise. And at least not all of it is bad. Something I was surprised at was how credible and non-clichéd the characters were, despite many of them being stereotypical and more than half of them not even being properly fleshed out. I didn't hate O'Neill's character, even though he was Moranis's nemesis. Really, the film was far less mean-spirited than the usual children's film. It didn't rely too much on gross-out comedy, either. Honestly, for what type of film this is, you could do much worse. I don't know... if you need a children's film, keep this one in mind as a possibility. I recommend this mainly to kids and parents of sports fanatics. Fans of Ed O'Neill and/or Rick Moranis might want to check it out as well. 5/10
Review of Little Giants
