Belated film reviews: Fun Size

About a week ago, picked straight out of one of my aforementioned film lists, I chose to watch Fun Size. The main reason why I elected it was how short it is (only an hour and twenty-six minutes long), but, considering what I saw with my own two eyes, it was an hour and twenty-six minutes too much.

Speaking of the lists again, in hindsight, I would love to know who compiled them, made the selection, what were their criteria. And, closer to the subject matter, who watched Fun Size and thought it could file under a great romantic comedy worth recommending?

Long story short, Fun Size centers around Wren, a teenager who is planning on attending a party with her best friend, April, for Halloween, like most kids her age do. She wants nothing more than a perfectly normal time. The plan goes south when her mother, Joy, recently widowed, is invited to a party of her own and asks her daughter to babysit her eight-year-old brother, Albert, and take him trick or treating around their neighbourhood of Denver, Colorado. The plan goes even further south when Albert, who is quite the mischievous child, manages to escape Wren's distracted supervision. She now has to spend the rest of her night trying to locate her young brother and bring him back home.

So much for a perfectly normal time for Halloween.

It's hard to figure out where to start with Fun Size. The plot itself, despite not being groundbreaking, is not a terrible launching platform for a fun, family-themed comedy, something fast-paced but emotional around the edges, wholesome and full of heart. It could have been a tale of these three people trying to escape their family, only to realise they needed each other, especially after a traumatic and life-changing event. I can imagine I would have enjoyed it a lot, had it gone down this road. Fun Size turned out to be a film that never knew what it wanted to be and ended up falling short in pretty much every way.

Let's start by taking a closer look at the cast. Wren, the main character, is portrayed by Victoria Justice, who I knew from Naomi And Ely's No Kiss List. I have also attempted at watching Victorious, trying to understand the phenomenon, but there are only so many pieces of fiction for which I am not the target audience that I can stomach. I like Victoria Justice. She is charismatic, a talented actress with the potential to be versatile. She is never the problem. I only wish I could see her in something I like. Wren's best friend, the ditzy, popularity-obsessed April, is played by Jane Levy, who I mostly know as Tessa from Suburgatory. Funnily enough, Thomas McDonell, the actor behind Adam Riley, Wren's crush, has also been in Suburgatory. (Is it a sign that I should rewatch it?) Despite growing up on Jackass, which, I admit, might be worrying, I could not even recognise Johnny Knoxville as Jurgen. That's how much my interest in Fun Size had dwindled by the time he was on screen.

I also find it quite interesting to point out that Riki Lindhome, who plays Denise, the college girl cosplaying as Galaxy Scout, was thirty-three years old at the time of filming. Part of me wishes to look this youthful when I turn thirty-three, but it is walked all over by the part of me who wishes casting directors would simply hire actors in the correct age bracket when making films. Sometime this week, I found out that Melinda Clarke, the actress who famously portrayed Julie Cooper in The O.C, was thirty-three years old during the first series. Imagine this! An adult being given the role of an adult! I couldn't help but think how, nowadays, thirty-three-year-olds are cast to play high school or college students with unrealistic bodies and faces, and Riki Lindhome in Fun Size is no exception.

The film starts with April and Wren walking Albert, Wren's eight-year-old brother, to school. Albert has not spoken a word since his father has passed away, the previous year, but his trauma-induced mutism, for lack of a better expression, is something I had to guess as opposed to something that was explained at any point. When the girls meet with Wren's friend Roosevelt (yes, like the two American presidents. I suppose Reagan, Lincoln, and Kennedy were too ordinary), he mentions Albert "still not talking," and the information is left on the side for the rest of the film. Also, does this kid go to a traditional school despite not speaking? From his general attitude, the cliché of the mischievous child who gets away with murder, I imagine he is also not followed by any sort of professional. The inconsistencies were beyond me.

Today is Halloween, and the trio talks about costumes, and, from her desire to go to a good college and dress up as Ruth Bader-Ginsburg, I understood that Wren is the cliché of the pretty nerd, the girl who is too clever to be accepted among the popular crowd, though she is childhood best friends with one of them, but prettier than a typical nerd, so they all are in love with her. Wren and Roosevelt rap in the middle of the street about it, don't ask, at this point, I am just spewing what I remember, and Adam Riley, the crush, drives by and invites Wren to his party. Seemingly, based on her rapping in the middle of the street.

That's when she realises she cannot possibly dress up as Ruth Bader-Ginsburg for Halloween.

Is this a thing nerdy kids genuinely do? I qualified as a nerd pretty much all the way to the end of my university career, and I still call myself a nerd, because I adore studying and learning things. For all my lack of social life as a teenager, never once have I wanted to dress up as a historical character for Halloween. The first costumed party I was ever invited to, for a friend's birthday, I went as Peyton Sawyer from One Tree Hill, in the episode where she dresses up as the angel of death, on season three. Since then, I have dressed as a witch, Angela Chase from My So-Called Life, and the dancing pumpkin guy from that video from a local American channel. At one of my work parties, which had a film theme, I dressed up as Claire from The Breakfast Club. My costume bucket list includes Heather Chandler from the film Heathers and Noelle from the Teenage Dirtbag music video. Am I desperately failing at being a nerd? Should I want to dress up as Ruth Bader-Ginsburg?

Before the party, Wren decides in favour of the Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz costume, which I can get behind and has a lovely meaning to it, but as she is leaving, her mother, Joy, informs her that she is going to have to take Albert trick or treating. Joy is herself attending a party with Keevan, not Kevin, the twenty-six-year-old guy she is dating. Joy's character was completely underdeveloped. She is obviously experiencing some form of trauma, following her husband's passing, and she is trying to figure out who she is without him. She changes her physical appearance (dying her hair blonde), dates younger men, and, apparently, dresses up as Britney Spears in the ...Baby One More Time music video for a Halloween party with people half her age. Her evident sadness at her husband's death is somewhat addressed in the film, but it is spun in a way that makes it look like a trivial little thing. She is at a party where she feels out of place, drinking tea with the parents instead of being in the bathroom, and it's "Look, I'm so sad I dressed up as Britney Spears" instead of "Actually, I can't quite figure out who I am anymore."

And it's a prime example of how Fun Size fell short.

It should be mentioned that Fun Size is a Nickelodeon film that ended up with a full theatre release. I grew up on Nickelodeon cartoons. Hey Arnold! and The Rugrats were staples of my childhood, and they were parent-approved shows as they mixed being fun and age-appropriate while tackling serious issues I could easily learn from. Fun Size, despite hailing from the same company, does nothing of the sort. It is not suitable for viewing for younger people and children, as the humour is crass and sometimes sexual, but it never goes deep enough underneath the surface of things to be enjoyable for teenagers or adults. Who is the target audience for this?

It was even more disturbing to find out that this mess had been produced by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, to whom I owe many of my favourite shows, such as The O.C., The Carrie Diaries, and Gossip Girl. How did we end up here?

Wren begrudgingly takes Albert trick or treating in their neighbourhood, and, somewhere in the haunted house, she gets distracted, and Albert runs away. She teams up with April, Roosevelt, and his friend Peng to try and locate him, and it is how we reached the one scene that made me laugh in the film. Before we get our hopes up, it was not full-on laughter but a slight giggle, but considering the comical trainwreck that is Fun Size, it meant the same. Roosevelt borrows his mothers' car after asking for it in ancient Greek, as one does, because the mothers are a modern hippie cliché who speak pre-Christian languages at home and weave tapestries of Barack Obama in their spare time. The teenagers drive through Denver, on the hunt for Albert in the sea of party-goers. The button of the stereo breaks while playing at full blast, and I have to admit that seeing four embarrassed teenagers in a car, stuck in traffic in a street full of cool people, while Josh Groban's You Raise Me Up was playing in the background, made me chuckle.

Speaking of Roosevelts' mothers, one of them was portrayed by Ana Gasteyer, the actress who plays Miss Cinoman in The Goldbergs, and it was all I could think about. Maybe if she had started dramatically singing a show tune, the film would have been better. It couldn't get any worse anyway.

On the other side of the story, Albert seems to be having a grand time by himself in town, finding his way to a 24-hour grocery store to drink slushies and make friends with Fuzzy, the clerk, without saying a word. What possessed a man in his early-to-mid twenties to ditch his workplace to hang out with an eight-year-old who doesn't speak nor have adult supervision? God knows, but it's far from being the strangest thing happening in Fun Size. The pair head to Fuzzy's ex-girlfriend's apartment, because he wants to revenge-prank her with toilet paper, and he accidentally sets fire to her neighbours' flat instead. Not a creepy guy, Fuzzy. Not at all. Everything's fine and dandy.

I lost track of most of what happened in Fun Size, but what I still remember feels like a fever dream. Surely, no one looked at the script and thought it worked and was a good comedy? I remember Albert ending up in a nightclub with Fuzzy and the Galaxy Scout girl, but I couldn't explain how they ended up there or where she even came from. I remember the teenagers trying to find Albert in the drive-thru of a chicken fast-food joint and, after an argument with two popular guys, the car reversed into the pole holding the giant chicken on top of the restaurant, which then fell on the car, destroyed it, all while looking like it was sharing an intimate moment with a Volvo. Peng, Roosevelt's friend, accidentally shoots the popular guy's chicken drumstick with the firearm in his costume, and the foursome ends up at Aaron Riley's party, where April, who was more worried about social suicide than she was about her best friend's traumatised, mute brother, lured them by pretending she had found him. (I personally would have not forgiven her, not on the spot, at least, but everything goes in Fun Size, and nothing goes below the surface.) Aaron plays a song for Wren and genuinely expects her to make out with him in public as a thank you for it, or something, which she doesn't.

Albert gets kidnapped by Jurgen, Fuzzy's ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend, but I couldn't explain why. Jurgen phones Wren and asks for ransom, which she offers in the form of her jacket, which belonged to one of the members of the Beastie Boys, because her father is credited on Licensed to Ill. Albert and Wren escape with the jacket, they walk back home through the cemetery, and Albert speaks for the first time in about a year, which is, again, not addressed at all. They make up with their mother, Wren and Roosevelt end up kissing, and April hooks up with Peng at the party, which I suppose escalated from her telling him that if he let her go from the car, he could touch her breasts for twenty seconds. Normal. So, so normal.

I want to believe this film was nothing but a fever dream.