Post by StevePulaski on May 24, 2017 13:08:08 GMT -5
Little Giants (1994)
Directed by: Duwayne Dunham
Directed by: Duwayne Dunham
Rick Moranis and Ed O'Neill.
Rating: ★★
Let's play a game of Mad-Libs - the popular, fill-in-the-blank game word-game - and try to create one of the oddest film adaptations with a bizzarely assembled cast and crew.
The film will be called Little Giants. Its source material will be a 1992 McDonald's Super Bowl commercial and the film's writers will be Jim Ferguson and Bob Shallcross, the developers of the commercial. The director will be Duwayne Dunham, a gun-for-hire known for his editing work on Return of the Jedi, and the film's cinematographer will be Janusz Kamiński, the Oscar-winning cinematographer that fully realized Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's List. Finally, Easy Rider's Donn Cambern will be responsible for the editing, while The Passion of the Christ composer John Debney will take over score-duties here. Pluck actors Rick Moranis and Ed O'Neill still riding high off of their Honey, I Shrunk the Kids fame and Married With Children, respectively, and you have a film that will make just under its production costs.
Little Giants is a strange brain-child of a "what if" idea had by the quietly desperate but generally optimistic film executives in the nineties, who ostensibly wondered what kids property they could initially peddle before allowing it to falter with direct-to-DVD spinoffs. That never happened in this case, and as a result, the film remains a curious comic pairing between two actors that have unfortunately fallen out of the limelight in the modern day.
The film revolves around the O'Shea brothers, Danny (Rick Moranis) and Kevin (Ed O'Neill), who have treated life as a bitter competition and rivalry since they were children. Kevin went on to be a Heisman Trophy winner in addition to a successful pee-wee football coach and car dealer in their hometown of Urbania, Ohio. Danny went on to operate a gas station and raise Becky (Shawna Waldron), a tomboy with a desire to play football. After Becky and her misfit friends are cut from Kevin's football team, Danny decides to assemble a football team out of the odds and ends of this group of children. There's a kid who has cookie-sheets for hands, another farts his way through games, and another who can't adequately run plays.
Danny hopes that his rag-tag team will wind up upsetting his brother's when the big game begins, but when parents intensify the rivalry between the two, Danny decides to bet his gas station on the game. If he winds up winning, he'll keep his business and acquire Kevin's dealership.
So the stakes are set very high and the fun begins in how great the ineptitude of Danny's team proves to be. Most of these hi-jinks are juvenile and predictable, but Moranis admirably smiles his way through, working away that likable personality of his that comes in handy when a film lies in arrested development. Paired with the contrasting, boisterous force known as Ed O'Neill, he at least doesn't have to commit to trying to be the most likable presence on screen, but his talents are nonetheless honed in a very forgettable way here.
Little Giants is your average, underdog sports story only done this time around with more jokes about flatulence. One looks at a film like this in comparison to the Emilio Estevez vehicle The Mighty Ducks and tries to figure out why that film worked so much better. For one, Estevez was a naturally charming and engaging screen-presence, but above that, there was a certain individuality that assisted all of the hockey playing kids in a way that was only juvenile on occasion. For the most part, it was a serious film and a seriously fun kids venture that showed teamwork commence rather than having to constantly affirm its existence by way of profiling ineptitude. Little Giants, despite having the solid talents of Moranis and O'Neill, frankly can't get its cast of kids up to par, but maybe considering its bargain-barrel screenplay, it goes the talent and treatment it was destined to all along.
Starring: Rick Moranis, Ed O'Neill, and Shawna Waldron. Directed by: Duwayne Dunham.