Little Man

Little Man
Just when you thought the Wayans brothers couldn't get any lower than White Chicks
Genre: Comedy Crime Starring: Marlon Wayans Shawn Wayans Kerry Washington Release Date: July 14, 2006 Runtime: 103 minutes Country: United States

Little Man (stylized as LiTTLEMAN) Is a 2006 American comedy-crime film directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans. It stars Marlon Wayans Shawn Wayans Kerry Washington. Despite its commercial success, the film received extremely negative reviews from critics.

Plot

Calvin Simms, a short and tiny criminal, has just committed a robbery involving stealing a precious diamond from a jewelry store along with his dim-witted partner, Percy. However, the snatch goes awry, and Calvin ends up ditching the diamond by stashing it in a woman's purse. Calvin must now pose as a young infant in order to retrieve the stolen diamond.

Why It Sucks

1. Much like in Fun Size, despite the film being meant to be a family movie, it has lots of extremely inappropriate stuff for a PG-13 rating.
   • The scene where Calvin tries to touch Brittany's breast is raunchy in a very inappropriate way.
   • The scene where Calvin wakes up in the morning next to Vanessa while Calvin was under the blankets, which is a rape joke.
   • The scene where Calvin is subjected to being breastfed by Jenet when he was wanting to be breastfed by Brittany, to the point of biting Jenet's breast while breastfeeding is very cringeworthy.
   • The scene where a dog urinates and made Calvin drink it all over his face is disgusting.
   • The scene where Calvin defecates himself after drinking a bottle of Castor Oil and he shits himself for a whole minute. This is very uncomfortable and embarrassing to watch.
   • The scene where Calvin gets his temperature checked by a rectal thermometer, is very cringeworthy and uncomfortable to watch, even for an adults movie.
2. The humor is very tasteless, mean-spirited, extremely raunchy, and unfunny. It also contains a lot of toilet humor and gross-out humor.
3. Aawful acting from Marlon Wayans. His acting gradually gets worse when he pretends to be a baby, cries, makes shrill sounds, and makes more weird, stupid expressions than before (Especially that creepily wide/cartoonish smile Calvin makes).
4. The special effects (especially Calvin's miniature body done by the young Linden Porco) can look kinda awkward to the point of being laughable.
5. Some camera angles like the POV/Close-up shots are done in such a weird way that it's very awkward to watch. Many examples of these include the scene of Brittany bouncing her boobs while Calvin was on her lap and when she was jiggling her boobs, a peekaboo scene with Darryl and Calvin, a fast-paced scene when Calvin charges into Greg while the latter was taunting him during a game of football, and the list goes on.
6. Overuse of racist stereotypes.
7. The whole film overall has bad writing and incoherences. There is no way Calvin can drive Darryl's car, or be fast enough to rob people if he was that little in real life.
8. Extremely stupid and nonsensical scenes. For example, after Vanessa changes Calvin's diaper, she is ecstatic to find the diamond (thinking it is a gift from Darryl), and not at all being horrified that a baby let out a large diamond without getting cut on the inside.
   • The worst example is how almost every character is WAY too stupid to notice that Calvin isn't an actual baby (not even the doctor notices this!), which is completely ridiculous. Especially when Calvin makes out with Brittany in front of everyone (including her husband Greg) and nobody questions nor responds to this! Like, Can you seriously not tell the difference between a grown man's face and a baby's face?!
   • Sure, the Soccer Mom offers to help Darryl track down the car Calvin was driving in when the latter stole Darryl's car, but she eventually starts acting obliviously and perceives Darryl's anxious and paranoid behavior as him "overreacting" after she was taking multiple risks with partaking in bad driving habits like talking to someone on the phone while not looking at the road, putting on make-up and cleaning the diaper of her baby in the back seat while she puts her foot on the wheel (not telling Darryl to get the wheel by the way!), which could've gotten everyone into a severe car crash; but everyone was ultimately saved by dumb luck (and from Darryl's screams/neurotic reactions). Which is painfully illogical, forced, and stupid at the same time.
     • There is also hypocrisy in this very scene since the Soccer Mom says "Look out where you're going moron!" to a casual driver when she didn't do that at all and is completely absent-minded to everything that just happened, especially since the Soccer Mom is basically a Idiot-Houdini who unintentionally caused stress to Darryl.
9. This film is also a blatant rip-off of the 1954 Bugs Bunny cartoon Baby Buggy Bunny, directed by Chuck Jones.
   • Down to having straight-up scenes that are outright copied from that short. Like Calvin reenacting some of Babyface Finster's violent habits (i.e the stolen lights-out gag; where little Calvin clubs a henchman (in cartoonish silhouette) every time the lights are turned off where the henchman then leans over the sleeping baby and says “Click” to then get whomped again, having Calvin's real identity revealed on the news while Pops is at a bar and the obvious similarity of Calvin receiving comeuppance for faking a childish facade by being thrown onto the roof and plummeting to the ground by Pops when he founded out who Calvin really is).
10. The characters range from being generic, typical, and/or tolerable at best, to being downright empty-headed, annoying, or unlikable at worst.
    • Calvin's facade as a baby is really lowbrow, obviously fake, and very groan-worthy for how much he gets away with (despite having some very slight comeuppances for his shortcomings). Especially for how he does some creepy things like watching Darryl and Vanessa make love in bed and then waking up in the morning next to Vanessa under the blankets, which implies that he raped Vanessa since the last scene in the movie shows that Vanessa has birthed a child. Which means that he counts as a Karma-Houdini.
    • Greg Ault is 'the jock type of husband to Brittany who is pretty rude, unlikable, cocky, and acts like a reckless jerk sometimes (especially how he somewhat mistreats his son Tommy and yells at his friend Darryl about football when Darryl was simply saying how harsh Greg was for dragging his son by the eyeshield from a football helmet Tommy had on).
      • In that following scene, when the guys were all playing football, Greg started yelling at Darryl in an obnoxiously egotistical, brutal, and aggressive way. He has no problem manhandling other people's children as well! To the point of getting comeuppance in the scene by Tommy calling him a p*ssy.
    • Pops, despite having some common sense, having his suspicions and having some redeeming qualities, is really stubborn, somewhat intolerant, selfish and snarky sometimes, and acts extremely self-reliant a lot of the time (for the right and wrong reasons).
    • Jimmy Murphy, who is a friend of Darryl that is a hammy and passionate singer who'd sing about anything happening at the diner Darryl and Vanessa went to, can be very annoying and unfunny sometimes.
    • Walken is the stereotypical head and control freak of the mafia, despite being a character who is supposed to come off as completely menacing and threatening compared to his henchmen Rosco and Bruno throughout, he starts to be a bit of a joke at the end of the movie prior to his arrest.
11. The poster is ugly and terrible.
12. The ending is really cheesy, sappy, and unfitting. The music played here when Darryl and Calvin reunite, is really corny.
    • Even after Calvin stops faking a babyish facade, he may have some remorse for his actions, but he genuinely acts pathetic and then loudly whines to himself like a crybaby as some type of guilt-tripping to make Darryl accept him back into the family by starting some form of a friendship with Darryl despite having every right to be kicked out (especially since he's a grown adult and is capable of living on his own as it would seem), which is unsatisfying.
    • The scene of an actual baby with Darryl's face on it is very disturbing to look at, and a terrible way to end this film.

Redeeming Qualities

1. The soundtrack isn't too bad.
2. There are a few funny scenes here and there.
   • Calvin and Pops have some form of rivalry that can be viewed as entertaining to some viewers, especially because of Pops's comical one-liners and comebacks.
   • All of the scenes with Calvin facing against Walker's goons, Rosco and Bruno, are entertaining to watch.
3. The special effects with Calvin's body and Marlon Wayans's expressions can be viewed as laughable/ludicrous for some unintentionally funny moments.
4. While Marlon Wayans's acting is awful, the other actors did a decent job at acting. Much to the point that you can tell all the actors were having fun with this movie.
5. As mentioned before, there are some tolerable characters.
   • Percy "P Unit" Pryor. An idiot for sure, but he isn't all that annoying or unlikable per se.
   • Rosco Key and Bruno, the goons to Walken, start off as typical lookouts for Walken, they slowly become more entertaining at the end of the movie.
   • Darryl Edwards is a likable father who is good-hearted and makes up for his mistakes and blunders despite being treated like a pushover (or a Butt-Monkey) most of the time.
   • While Jimmy can be annoying sometimes, he is rather tolerable and can be viewed as hilarious.
   • Richard Sellens along with his son Nicholas may be mellow, tame, and act really soft, but they, along with the mom Jenet, are likable people who slowly grow some amount of confidence in the football scene through some brief amount of character development.

Reception

The film receives extremely negative reviews from critics, and it holds a 12% on Rotten Tomatoes and according to The site's consensus is "Another gimmicky comedy from the Wayans brothers, Little Man comes with the requisite raunchiness, but forgot to bring the laughs".

Metacritic scores a film a 26/100 "generally unfavorable reviews". While IMDB scores a film a 4.4/10 rating.

Critic Cynthia Fuchs wrote a negative review about the film; "Noisy and gleefully stupid, "Little Man" is a one-joke movie that doesn't pretend to be anything else. None of it is very funny -- the gags are both predictable and uneven."

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