Jack
Normally, I love Robin Williams, even though the overall movie might not be so great, for instance Toys. One of his best films, The Fisher King is an example of the talent that can be produced by Williams. But when that talent isn't put to good use, you get a movie like Jack. In Mrs. Doubtfire, Williams played a cross-dresser just to be near his kids, and the movie was hilarious because of his antics to hide his identity. Jack, however, seems to miss all that humor and can't figure out what genre it is trying for.
I watched Jack with an expectation for either comic genius or a good moral message. What did I get? I got nothing. Robin Williams tries very hard to make Jack work, but the screenplay is unintelligent (one scene has several kids "breaking wind" into a can and smelling it) and very stupid. The only truely good scenes are when Jack (Robin Williams) plays with his mom and when he tries to ask his teacher to go to the dance with him, mainly because the rest of the girls his age are about 3 times shorter than him. Other than that, the movie is trying to find it's way out of the mess that it dug itself into.
The movie begins with Jack's mother giving birth when she is only 2 months along. The baby arrives completely healthy, except for one minor problem: Jack grows at 4 times the normal rate. I realize that this seemed like a good premise, and it certainly is, but the conception of the rest of the movie just goes downhill and never quite gets the strength to get back up. Jack is hidden from the world until he turns 10 and then he and his tutor want him to go to school, public school. His parents finally let him go, and, of course, he is alienated by the kids because he looks like a grown up. In one scene, which I don't know why was here except for comic relief, Jack tries to sit in a desk built for the average sized 10 year old. The desk, nevertheless, falls apart and all the kids laugh at him.
If only the screenwriters James DeMonaco and Gary Nadeau, and director Francis Ford Coppola could have chosen a genre and stuck with it, Jack could have been a very good movie. Sometimes the movie would be a comedy, albeit not a very funny one, and sometimes it would be a drama trying to teach morals, which doesn't work either. Two reasons that I wanted to see this movie for were big disappointments: 1) Fran Drescher, whom I love from her hit TV show, "The Nanny", and 2) Bill Cosby. Drescher had an awful part and I blame it on the writers for her messy character. Cosby had an even worse part than Drescher, and that's mainly because he starts out as a normal adult, and then changes into an immature dork who isn't funny.
Some of the concepts of the movie are good, but there aren't enough of them to work. In a really good scene, Jack goes into a convenience store and buys a Penthouse. These are the things that kids have on their minds, and if they had an adult with the mind of a kid, they could get all sorts of things, such as cigarettes and alcohol. I'm not saying that it would be appropriate for kids, but it would at least be better than this mess. Besides, we've seen this movie done before, such as Big with Tom Hanks. Big was very good because it was funny and taught good morals, such as enjoy your childhood while it is here. I'm not exactly sure what kind of moral message was being put off by Jack, especially since it was rated PG-13. Because it wasn't for kids, they should have made it more intelligent. If it was meant for kids, take out the offensive stuff, and still make it more intelligent, because let's face it: kids aren't stupid.
Jack is rated PG-13 for sexual innuendo and language. There is also some violence in a bar scene, which is a totally unnecessary scene. There are a few scenes that were funny because the adults were talking to Jack as if he were an adult, and he didn't understand and took it the wrong way. But there aren't enough of these scenes to make it a comedy. And there weren't enough scenes to make it a drama, which probably would have made it a better movie, had they taken it from a different perspective. Maybe the producers will learn from the box office reports that people don't want movies like this... we want intelligent movies that make us laugh instead of gag.