Kid Power Incorporated

Big Fat Liar asks the perennial question: wouldn’t it be really cool if you could jump off the tram on the Universal Studio Tour and live on the studio back lot? It’s a question that has amused kids since time immemorial. Well, OK, maybe not that long, but at least since the first baby boomer chugged through the Disneyland Jungle Cruise and thought how keen it would be to live in the jungle with a lot of mechanical elephants and hippos.

Big Fat Liar asks other questions, too. How many product placements can be crammed into one 85-minute movie? How many times can one movie plug the upcoming 20th anniversary reissue of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial? How little can a movie get away with giving a family audience the price of their movie tickets?

Frankie Muniz, the young actor from Fox TV’s Malcolm in the Middle, plays Jason Shepherd, a Michigan teenager who works harder making up excuses for not doing his work than he does at doing the homework itself. No simple dog-ate-my-homework will do for Jason; he constructs elaborate lies, then backs them up with equally elaborate alibis, in which he is abetted by his slightly reluctant best friend Kaylee (Amanda Bynes).

One day Jason gets caught in a lie over a creative writing assignment, but his teacher gives him until 6 p.m. to turn in the story. Jason goes home and, in a sudden flash of inspiration, writes a story called “Big Fat Liar” that he’s sure will get him an “A.” Rushing to the school to turn the story in before his deadline, he collides with a stretch limo hauling one Marty Wolf (Paul Giamatti), a sleazy Hollywood producer in town for a location shoot. Marty gives Jason a ride to school and, after Jason has left the car, finds the story he left behind. With no story to show, Jason winds up in summer school—then finds out that Marty Wolf’s next production will be none other than Jason’s own story, “Big Fat Liar.” But by this time, Jason has cried wolf (the pun is probably intended) so many times that no one will believe him. Jason and Kaylee take off for Hollywood to get Marty Wolf to fess up so Jason can regain his parents’ respect.

Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Well, to give credit where it’s due, this much of the movie seems to play better than it sounds. But that’s the best that can be said for Big Fat Liar—that for the first half-hour or so it squeaks by with the bare minimum of conviction.

Once Jason and Kaylee get to Hollywood and are snidely rebuffed by the ill-tempered Wolf, they clench their teeth in an of-course-you-know-this-means-war snarl and set about getting back at Marty by clever use of his stolen palm pilot. At this point Big Fat Liar abandons all pretense to taking place in the real world and becomes a paean to Kid Power, showing our young hero and heroine using Yankee ingenuity and pure moral force to put the unscrupulous grown-up in his place. Aiding them greatly in this is the fact that everywhere they turn they run into someone with a grudge against Marty Wolf. They gather allies at every turn.

Having exhausted their meager supply of invention in the first third of their film, writers Dan Schneider and Brian Robbins and director Shawn Levy simply tread water for the last hour. As Hollywood satires go, this is hardly What Makes Sammy Run? but it doesn’t aspire to be. But then, just what does it aspire to be? Big Fat Liar is dumb and sloppy, but it’s not exactly corrupt. It simply seems to have been developed backward, as if the promotion department shot a trailer for a kids’ movie they figured they could sell, then hired Schneider, Robbins and Levy to expand it into a whole movie. Ironically, this seems to be how Marty Wolf himself works. Jason first learns of Marty’s theft when he sees the preview trailer for his stolen story in the theater, then when he and Kaylee get to Hollywood Marty is still working on the script and hasn’t even started shooting.

I mentioned the best that could be said for Big Fat Liar. This is the worst: it looks like a Marty Wolf Production—that is, like the kind of movie its own villain would make.