Movie Review - Little

Regina Hall was such a delight in the recent Girls Trip (2017) in which she played a well-rounded, fully fleshed out person. Here, for the most part, she's playing a cartoon character, a caricature of even the mean boss Meryl Streep inhabited in The Devil Wears Prada (2006). Hall plays Jordan Sanders, the meanest of mean. Even if you took all the bad or mean employers in Horrible Bosses (2011), added them together and multiplied them by 100, you'd still wouldn't come close to what Jordan Sanders is. She runs a tech company in Atlanta with an iron fist where she has no problem dehumanizing and belittling her workers, especially her assistant.

Issa Rae who most people know from the HBO series Insecure but who also worked opposite Hall in the recent film The Hate U Give (2018) plays April Williams, the put-upon assistant who is tech-minded and has ideas for the company but is limited to fetching coffee and dry cleaning. She's very timid and a bit of a doormat. This doesn't seem to be a trait that is unique to her. Every person at Jordan's company is a doormat compared to the overbearing nature that is Jordan's style of leadership.

If the screenplay by director Tina Gordon and co-writer Tracy Oliver were stronger, it would have explored April's character and her reticence or timidity more, instead of simply using it as a recurring gag. Instead of being frustrated at her job, the only other thing we learn about April is that she's single and horny, which is totally understandable, given that every guy in this film is beyond eye-candy, including Tone Bell (Fam and Whitney), Justin Hartley (This Is Us and Smallville) and Luke James (Star and The New Edition Story). Aside from the opening scene in which we see April's apartment briefly, we really don't get any more insight into April's world or her life outside work.

This would be fine, if this film didn't feel like it was trying to be a two-hander. A movie can have a single protagonist and focus on that person to the exclusion of others. I probably would have appreciated this film more if it did that, but this film feels like it's set up to have dual protagonists. It's set up to be about both Jordan and April, as one deals with personal problems and the other deals with professional problems. It's a balancing act that I don't feel like this film fully succeeds in balancing.

Marsai Martin (Black-ish) plays Jordan Sanders at age 13, a teenage girl who is essentially a science geek. She gets bullied so significantly that it sends her on a path of becoming the ultimate bully herself. However, the film becomes a reverse version of Big (1988) where some body-swap magic takes Jordan from being portrayed by Hall to being portrayed back to Martin overnight. Instead of being an adult, she's all-of-a-sudden a child again. In that, it's also not that dissimilar from Freaky Friday (2003). It's simply half of that story.

Unfortunately, it's here that the film loses its way. It makes some sense. Jordan has been a bully as her adult self, so when she returns to middle school as a teenager again, it makes sense that she gets bullied back. However, her being bullied is what the film starts out doing. Overall in this film, we see her getting bullied twice and I don't understand why. I suppose that it's done merely for comedy's sake to see teenage Jordan be the butt of practical jokes or physical humor. Narrative-wise though, it's unclear what point Gordon and Oliver are trying to make. Yes, bullying is bad. Having Jordan go through it again doesn't underline that point in any significant way. I think the idea of bullying begetting more bullying was done more effectively in the Oscar-winning film Moonlight (2016). It's done in a clunky way here.

It didn't seem that when Jordan experienced bullying the first time back in 1993, she didn't have the support group that she gets in 2019. Jordan meets three middle schoolers who are also the subject of bullying. These bullied kids have their own table in the cafeteria in the corner away from everyone else. It's not uncommon, but Jordan didn't seem to have kids to support her back in 1993. It seems as if she didn't have any friends back then, which probably contributed to her becoming a bully as an adult. Other than seeing her parents briefly in 1993, we don't even know if Jordan has any family who have tried to address her behavior till now.

Yet, if these kids are the key to Jordan changing her ways, the movie doesn't spend nearly enough time with them to have them make any real impact. Walking out of the film, I couldn't even tell you the names of the three middle schoolers that Jordan meets. One would assume that Jordan's relationship with April would be the key, but the movie makes the decision to split the two up, so that Jordan can go back to middle school. A disconnect between Jordan and April forms whereas a bond is supposed to be in the making.

The lesson that is perhaps being imparted here is that there is this aggressive persona, a bully for lack of a better word, that some might believe is the persona needed in order to succeed or win in school and in corporate America. Jordan believes that's what she needs to be in order to succeed. This experience is meant to teach her that that idea isn't the case. How that manifests itself is through a corny talent contest that culminates in a dance-number. Given that Jordan started out interested in science and given that she started a tech company, one would think that her lesson would culminate in something science or tech related, but I don't think this movie is smart-enough to bother with delving in actual science or tech knowledge.

Rated PG-13 for some suggestive content.
Running Time: 1 hr. and 49 mins.