Review of Getting Even With Dad

Introduction

“Top 95 percentile” brat Culkin is abandoned by his flaky aunt and her wretched sleazeball husband on the doorstep of the kid’s estranged father and crap thief Ray (Ted Danson), who, rather unfortunately is amidst planning a daring rare-coin heist and isn’t exactly in the mood to play “catch” in the “yard” with the sprog. However, when said sprog catches wind of Ray’s scam, he half-inches the coins and bribes his father, along with his two bumbling cohorts (Saul Rubinek and Gailard Sartain as agony-prone caricatures) to a week of father/son bonding at the end of which, if the ‘quality time’ satisfies Culkin’s appetite for aquariums and ice-cream, he will reveal the location of the coins. However, since this distinctly anorexic premise requires some injected ‘intrigue’, enter door-mouse voiced Gleanne Headly as a rookie cop on Ray’s case; as well as the hilarious shenanigans that ensue once Rubinek and Sartain decide to search for the diamonds on their own. If your thinking that at some point one or either of them gets covered in some sort of crap and/or refuse, you’re way ahead of me.

Video

Pretty good all things considered. No trace of artificacts and the transfer is free of blemishes and dirt. Good colours too.

Audio

Serviceable stereo track in several languages.

Features

The laborious trailer, and helpful Polish subtitles.

Conclusion

Ludicrously resourceful scamp outsmarts relentlessly underestimating adults to the strains of “He’s just a kid” whilst mending familial bonds and bemoaning his father’s moral indiscretions. Oh my. Ostensibly a hurriedly assembled vehicle for the dubious charms of Culkin, whose appeal seems to rest solely in his frail, po-faced quips and delight of tormenting hapless adults and boastfully exuding his clairvoyant adolescent intellect. As a mobilization of Culkin’s talents, it certainly clocks in all of the ‘Home Alone’ schtick that made him famous: Rubinek/Sartain endure the derivative Pesci/Stern ritual humiliation, reserved only for those not seduced by Culkin’s smug persona; indeed, Rubinek in particular has the bizarre misfortune to be constantly mistaken for performing acts of random child abuse. The sentimental father/son bonding is a little less saccharine than expected, due only to Danson’s grounded charisma, which ends up being the only faint virtue of an extremely tired scenario: the post-Reagan obsession with mending the ‘broken-family’ gap through obedience to conservative norms and saluting the American Way (Danson’s claims that this is his final job to finance a bakery business are summarily dismissed by the joyless Culkin, who insists that pa` must warrant self-determination through discipline and hard work.)

The tacked-on love story comes as something of a surprise, perhaps due simply to how implausible it is: Headly soon scrubs up from her austere, bumbling attire and shocking berets into sculpted Hitchcock femme, soon attracting the whims of the incorrigible Danson (who seems insistent on teaching his 11 year old son how to degrade women.) Whilst the narrative mumbles along to its desperately contrived and predictable conclusion, one can’t help but fixate on matters hirsute: Danson boasts a mighty, gravity-defying mullet (tamed only by a dainty ponytail).

The hapless bumbling that occasionally arises amongst the forced paternalism is unlikely to impress kids who have more consistent and gratifying CGI cartoons to amuse them. It’s equally unlikely that family audiences (whatever the Hell that means anyway) will have any shared memories of Culkin by this point, thus rendering his post-‘Home Alone’ catalogue rather redundant. Which is rather fortunate really as we can all try and forget this tired, cynical trawl and hope that Culkin remains in whatever angst-ridden pit of post-decadent despair he’s collapsed into, and pray that the inevitable come-back in a glittery ‘guns n’ bitches’ crime thriller, playing a drug-addled pimp/smack addict who says ‘f***’ a lot to his spaced out crack-whore girlfriend, can be skipped altogether. Culkin, stay away. You owe us.