“Fun Size”

Fun Size is a longer, slightly more complicated version of almost any of the cloned Nickelodeon television series that clog that network. Why would I expect anything else?

The characters are a pretty girl and her best friend and the geeky boy who has loved the pretty girl since forever. The pretty girl is geeky enough herself to think she’ll go to Halloween dressed as Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The rest of the plot is so complicated I don’t think I’ll go into it. Suffice it to say that the pretty girl gets led astray for a while but by the end realizes that the geeky guy is the only one for her.

The title, Fun Size, I think, must refer to the pretty girl’s little brother. She is put in charge of taking him around on Halloween. She loses him, lots of people find him and have fun with him.

He’s eight and a smart kid and a bit of a prankster. He also hasn’t spoken since their father died a year ago. The mother has a problem with that. The absent father, not the kid not talking. She’s trying to live her life as though she was still a twentysomething. But there I go getting drawn into trying to relay the overly complicated plot. It’s like trying to tell the plot of a soap opera that’s been going on for ten years.

I guess people who enjoy the sappy reality of those Nickelodeon television series will enjoy it. I think it plays to the most simplistic of sensibilities. It’s part of the ‘dumbing down’ of the United States. If you believe in “death panels” and think that claiming to have “binders full of women” makes you sympathetic to the fact that women earn seventy two cents on the dollar compared to men then you will like it.

Some producers at Nickelodeon fell in love with this little boy who has two expressions, the dead pan stare one and the smiling one. They thought they could build a movie around him. They even called it Fun Size because they think that when packaged like this overweight at eight is a ‘fun size’. I think they were wrong.

Fun Size opens Friday, Oct. 26.