John Ritter is the affectionate, middle-class Dad who adopts Junior, and Jack Warden is Junior's unscrupulous new grandfather. This behavior never seems dangerous, and it never seems funny.Īs directed by the actor Dennis Dugan, everyone seems to be yelling their lines and making huge hand gestures instead of acting. When he is adopted by a middle-class family, he sets fire to his room and tosses the cat around. So Junior is enough to try the patience of a nun? ''Problem Child'' shows him infuriating nuns at an orphanage, sometimes by calling them penguins. That is the totally unfulfilled concept behind the movie.ĭespite his strange attachment to a killer, Junior is mischievous in the way only derivative screenwriters and directors conditioned by sit-coms could possibly find amusing. We aren't all blessed with Wordsworth's sense of childhood as a romantic idyll, but even hack film makers who think a malevolent orphan is raw comic material might show more imagination than they do in ''Problem Child.'' Junior is a red-haired, freckle-faced 7-year-old, a ringer for Opie on television's ''Andy Griffith Show.'' Imagine what would have happened if Andy and Aunt Bea had abandoned Opie at birth, and the unloved boy had turned into a child who writes fan letters to a famous murderer.
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