Big Fat Liar

A teenager (Frankie Muniz) wreaks adolescent vengeance on sleazeball Hollywood producer Marty Wolf (Paul Giamatti), who stole the kid’s story for his upcoming blockbuster movie. Between rampant product placements, plugs for the Universal Studio Tour and promos for the upcoming reissue of E.T. the Extraterrestrial, writers Dan Schneider and Brian Robbins and director Shawn Levy ask the perennial question: How little can a movie get away with giving a family audience for the price of their movie tickets? Dumb and sloppy, this paean to Kid Power (and putting uppity grownups in their place) seems to have been developed from a preview trailer concocted by the Universal promotion department. In fact, it looks exactly like a Marty Wolf Production—it’s the kind of movie its own villain would make.