Here's a well-worn movie formula. A man who is either socially withdrawn or recklessly womanising (our hero is somehow both) suddenly has a small child dumped on his doorstep. The child is in some contrived way "his" and thus can't be gotten rid of easily. Man at first dislikes child; then child effortlessly changes man's life. Cold heart becomes all warmed up by bundle of cuteness. Does the inside of your mouth feel sticky now?
It's worth bearing in mind that the above formula of this inexplicable Oscar-winner is the same one used in the Burt Reynolds turkey "Cop and a Half" and the recently released "The Game Plan", starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. Quite an artistic pedigree.
The eponymous child in this film is actually an appalling dullard who almost never speaks and scarcely does anything interesting for the whole film. So it is a small mercy that a third of the movie is over before the boy makes his appearance (with an extreme close-up of his runny nose).
By the time I was into the final third of this film I found myself gazing around my living room in boredom. Soon I was fast-forwarding over every three minutes of footage. (Pity the poor cinema-goers who had no such advantage!) At every place I stopped nothing interesting was happening. The ending tries to inflate itself into importance by using the fall of Communism in Prague as a backdrop, a manoeuvre that's as objectionable as all the attempted viewer manipulation that preceded it.
It's worth bearing in mind that the above formula of this inexplicable Oscar-winner is the same one used in the Burt Reynolds turkey "Cop and a Half" and the recently released "The Game Plan", starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. Quite an artistic pedigree.
The eponymous child in this film is actually an appalling dullard who almost never speaks and scarcely does anything interesting for the whole film. So it is a small mercy that a third of the movie is over before the boy makes his appearance (with an extreme close-up of his runny nose).
By the time I was into the final third of this film I found myself gazing around my living room in boredom. Soon I was fast-forwarding over every three minutes of footage. (Pity the poor cinema-goers who had no such advantage!) At every place I stopped nothing interesting was happening. The ending tries to inflate itself into importance by using the fall of Communism in Prague as a backdrop, a manoeuvre that's as objectionable as all the attempted viewer manipulation that preceded it.