film | Baby vomit

Let me be perfectly clear: I do not accept the premise of LITTLE MAN. Not today, not yesterday, not tomorrow. Not now, not ever. Not with a fox, not in a box. Not if director Keenen Ivory Wayans aimed a potato gun at my face and told me to dig this flick or he'd pull the trigger. Look, I don't even know if a potato gun shoots bullets or tater tots, but because I won't risk giving even a teeniest scrap of endorsement to an alleged comedy in which a diminutive jewel thief poses as an abandoned infant to swipe a priceless diamond from a suburban couple, I'm willing to sustain cranial harm or — far scarier — stray from my low-carb diet.

What pushed me into full-tilt hateration? Was it the creepy digital effects that superimpose the mugging head of Marlon Wayans (6'2") onto the bodies of either child actor Linden Porco or dwarf actor Gabriel Pimental? The way the newlyweds (Shawn Wayans and Ray's Kerry Washington, too good for this shit) who "unknowingly" take him in are portrayed as utter idiots beyond even the realm of stupid-humor conceivability? The wheezy gags centered around rectal thermometers and breast milk that you'll see coming from whatever distance you decide to appropriate between you and this film? The story's nonsensical logistics (i.e., how Marlon can't seem to just fucking slip out of sight and fucking abscond with the fucking rock already despite apparently making time to shave his entire body in secret at least twice a day, or that nobody questions his full set of adult teeth, his air force tattoo, or his developed genitals)? The bizarro tone shift from crotch-smashin' jamboree to daddy-never-loved-me schmaltz? No, it was probably the bit in which Marlon feigns fear of the dark so he can sleep between his doltish foster parents in their bed, where he — somehow — rapes Washington while she thinks she's having sex with Shawn. Charming with a capital H, A, R and M.

So who the hell is Little Man's target audience? Tough call. The crudity ain't for children, but the juvenile writing — by Keenan, Marlon and Shawn, of course — and sloppy staging aren't exactly going to sell the clunky poop-and-boobies jokes to anyone who made it through puberty with half a brain cell. No, it's undoubtedly a movie only for the entire family — the entire Wayans family. F