Pay-back time
Mark Steyn
Big Fat Liar operates in that potentially perilous terrain between cutesy kid pies and noisy teen comedies but does it with enormous likeability. It's a Hollywood revenge comedy — The Executive Vice. Presidentof Monte Cristo, so to speak — and in the excellent middle section I was laughing out loud most of the time, which is more than I can say for most grown-up yukfests.
It begins in Anytown, USA — I think it's somewhere in Michigan — where Jason Shepherd, a congenital liar, is in the unusual position of having been caught out. His the-dog-ate-my-homework excuse having gone awry, the 14-year-old is told he has until 6 p.m. to turn in the missing class essay. So he gets to work and cranks out an autobiographical tale called Big Fat Liar, and is en route to deliver it when he's hit by the stretch limo of a Hollywood producer. These things happen. When he gets to his schoolma'am just in time for that 6 o'clock deadline, he realises he's left his essay with the movie guy: the limo ate my homework. Teach and mom and dad are so not impressed.
As a consequence, Jason has to spend his vacation in summer school with a bunch of losers — that's the Count of Monte Cristo prison-time bit. One day, he and his friend Kaylee are at the movies when a trailer comes on for Marty Wolf's forthcoming surefire hit .. . Big Fat Liar. The Hollywood guy stole Jason's script.
So Jason and Kaylee do what any selfrespecting 14-year-olds would do: they take off for Hollywood. All the boy wants is for Mr Wolf to call Jason's dad and say he wasn't lying when he told the truth about having written a story about his lies. But the Wolfman didn't get where he was today by falling for some little punk's sappy con: he's thinking lawsuit, split royalties, big money. So he throws the kid out. Which is when Jason and Kaylee decide to torment Marty into doing the right thing.
Their first big operation involves getting the Wolf dyed blue and orange and having him dropped off not at the studio president's pad but at a kids' party where the birthday brat yells, 'Hey, it's the clown! Let's hurt him!' Pretty soon his cellphone's glued to his ear and he's managed to run afoul of a dude with the tallest jacked-up pickup truck in Beverly Hills. The great thing about the picture, though, is the way Marty manages to take these somewhat unlikely mishaps as the kind of temporary setbacks bound to occur from time to time when you're doing business in Los Angeles. As played by Paul Giamatti, the Wolfman is a liar, a creep and a sleazebag, but his accumulating frustrations are endearing: he's like a Merrie Melodies cartoon villain — no matter how many times he's flattened, incinerated, tossed from the helicopter, he bounces back and gets on with the game.
There are several fine performances in Big Fat Liar, from the principals to the cameos, which include a game turn from Lee Majors (the Six-Million Dollar Man lui-meme) as a sorely put-upon stuntman. But I think special credit should be given to the easy rapport of the leads, Frankie Muniz as 14-year-old Jason and Amanda Bynes as 14-year-old but taller Kaylee. Frankie stars as TV's Malcolm in the Middle and Amanda stars in TV's The Amanda Show. I don't know anyone who's seen these shows or has even heard of them, but on the strength of their performances I wouldn't mind tuning them in. Miss Bynes spends most of the movie covering for Jason by pretending to be a blasé receptionist, etc. Mr Muniz's quick-witted incorrigibility is cute in a kid actor but may not play so well in ten or twenty years, so make the most of the guy now. The two together are just dandy and the sense that they're enjoying themselves gets you over the lamer moments of the plot.
Shawn Levy directs in an unflashy way that gives an eclectic cast the chance to shine. I hesitate to use the phrase 'good old-fashioned fun', though some of it's certainly old-fashioned: the Universal back lot, on which the kids spend much of the movie running around, is a riot of costume extras — biblical prophets, space aliens, can-can choruses, cowboy gangs, which would have been a pretty representative back lot circa 1952 but not since; one assumes Levy and co. are merely honouring a revered convention. Still, if it's oldfashioned, it's not squaresville: Muniz and Hynes are like the Spy Kids kids, youngsters of today running rings around the adults. But I like the way they manage to do it without the noise and charmlessness of so many kid flicks. You gotta love a movie that goes to such lengths to avoid naughty words it even contains the not entirely persuasive line, 'Shut the heck up.'
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