Fun Size
Tween Hallowe'en comedy that never delivers on its promise of its weak premise
After the recent death of Beastie Boys' Adam Yauch, the band announced that they would not license their music for use in adverts. Presumably the crassest of teen comedies are a more acceptable medium, as Fun Size’s lamentable climax involves their 'Fight For Your Right' anthem played over a grotesque scene in which a Pepto-Bismol chugging junkie (played by Jackass star Johnny Knoxville) is tortured by teenage kids throwing fireworks into his house. It’s hard to imagine this as something Yauch would have wanted.
It’s equally hard to imagine who would want Fun Size, a labored tween comedy that belies the considerable experience of Nickelodeon, the US TV channel responsible. Falling between the smarts of Mean Girls and the goofy Diary of a Wimpy Kid franchise, Fun Size never delivers on its promise of its weak premise.
Victoria Justice, star of her own TV show Victorious, and Jane Levy from Suburgatory, star as Wren and April, hoping to attend a Halloween party and hang out with class hotties like Aaron Riley (Thomas McDonell). Wren’s mother (Chelsea Handler) decides to go out instead, leaving Wren to babysit her own little brother Albert (Jackson Nicoll). The diminutive Albert, dressed in his mini-Spiderman costume, gets lost, and Wren and April have to hit the local party scene to find him.
Despite being directed by The OC/Gossip Girl producer Josh Schwartz, Fun Size seems highly uncomfortable with the details of teenage life, and settles for predictable gags about the desirability of touching breasts, bags of dog excrement left on porch steps, and the appeal of fireworks as children’s playthings. One brief moment, involving a large mechanical chicken humping a car, works, but the rest of the offerings from Fun Size fizzle: teenagers deserve bigger portions of entertainment than these meagre morsels.