LITTLE - film / by Stephanie Puls

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Reviews of this film were embargoed til release day. When this happens it typically means one of two things. Either it’s a massive blockbuster that will definitely be a big success and they want to keep some mystery OR the film is a massive dud and they want to stop poor word-of-mouth from affecting opening weekend ticket sales. It’s sadly definitely the latter in this case.

Little is pretty terrible. In light of that, I won’t labour over telling you too much about it but in summary, scary corporate boss lady somehow (I’d tell you but it’s dumb) winds up inhabiting the body of her 13 year old self when she learns life lessons that help her to be less nasty when she’s returned to her adult body. Yeah, look, it sounds stupid because it is.

As I was watching this film thinking about how bad it is and how much I’d like to leave (I never do if I’m blogging about a film - you can’t be fair if you haven’t seen the whole thing), I wondered if I just hated it because I’m not the target audience. So I turned my mind to my nieces who are aged between 12 and 17 - what I presume is in large part the target - and wondered what they’d think. I think it’s safe to say the younger ones would find it funnier than I did but the older ones would just think it was a bit lame. And frankly any film with ‘jokes’ about ‘crack babies’ and trans people is not something I’d support them watching anyway. It’s a real pity because a film with so much diversity in the cast would be really welcome if it were actually any good.

In the interests of fairness, not everyone dislikes this one as much as me. For example, Fairfax has given it 3.5 stars which is 1.5 stars too many in my opinion… which incidentally aligns with what The Guardian has given it.!

Little opens today and is rated PG. Trailer here.