My Big Fat Liar review
I've finally gotten round to watching Big Fat Liar. I really liked the initial premise of the movie and the first 15 minutes or so. The idea of a inveterate teen liar, who at long last gets into big trouble, and then has to prove against all odds that his tall tale of a stolen script is genuine, and redeem himself in the process, is a good one. Frankie, as always, is engaging, lively, charming and versatile, and he's well matched with Amanda Bynes.
When I watched the opening sequences, I decided this was not supposed to be a slapstick farce (where everyone is racing around like frantic fools, knocking over and throwing stuff), or an absurdist comedy (where anything might happen, from, say, talking llamas to breakdancing nuns), but a story-driven comedy with some believability to it, some sort of Ferris Bueller take-off, which I could appreciate. I always have this notion that even in comedy, a story should stay true to its own premise and should stick to what is imaginable within its context.
Frankie may play a highly skilled cheat, but he's still a young teen, and the scenes at school and at home are true to that. That's why I got hugely disappointed by the plot development. When I saw the silly scene of Amanda's older movie brother dressing up like a girl to prove to his senile grandma that he was his sister, I got my doubts, but I really thought the movie took a wrong turn when a taxi driver (Scrubs' Donald Faison) mistakes Frankie in his slacker gear for some wealthy fur distributor, just by telling him he's the guy on the sign he's holding up.
This crossed the line from Frankie being just a fairly ordinary kid to some super-con man/whizkid on an equal footing with adults. Apart from the fact that more and more plotholes got in the way, this continues when we see Frankie and Amanda running around on the studio lot, snooping around and bursting into offices, private property and other buildings with perfect ease, sabotaging cars and messing about with computers like seasoned professionals in a farcical series of events that my movie guide rightly calls 'inane antics that quickly wear thin and will only prove riveting to the preteen crowd'.
I thought this was a let-down and a sell-out, not to mention some sequences (as in most teen comedies, I must admit) whose sole purpose seemed they were put in and edited to match some song being plugged on the soundtrack. Turning to the online cast and crew list of IMDB, I noticed that this was the brainchild of Dan Schneider, responsible for countless fairly simple-minded, farcical Nickelodeon fare like iCarly, Zoey 101 and Drake & Josh, so I guess this is all I should have expected and all I could have asked for. Technically speaking, the movie is impeccable, running very smoothly, with a high-gloss look to it.
Still, I think it's a pity to see capable actors under-used in this way, and an audience which can be called discerning and reasonable mature being short-changed. Of course, it all had to end on very a moralistic note, there was no escaping that obligatory element either. Yes, I guess I'm perhaps too old for this, but I do think it's bad underestimating your viewers, even if they're young teens. MITM always took its audience seriously with its intertwined plots, and story twists and asides adults would really enjoy as well.
