Leave it to Hollywood. Come up with a successful movie and soon enough the entire industry is jumping on the premise like it's a cockroach at a bar mitzvah. The huge gate for last year's Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story guaranteed a cavalcade of films built around classic childhood games. First to hit the screens is Hide And Seek, a murky movie that combines contrived comedy with a pointless plot.
Hide And Seek stars Robert De Niro and Dakota Fanning, long recognized as two of America's most gifted actors. Oddly, their storied careers have not crossed paths until now. “We came close once,” admits Fanning “I read for the part of Masha in King Of Comedy. Marty (director Martin Scorcese) went with Sandra Bernhard. I was like, whatever.” It's a shame, then, that this duo's long-delayed partnering was not blessed with better material. De Niro and Fanning play a father and daughter who leave Manhattan for Snellsville, a small upstate community where Hide and Seek is a way of life for area youth. The kids wear camouflage and are harried by parents haunted by the failures of their own childhoods -- attempts to crouch behind bushes too small to conceal, positions given away by neighborhood mutts, uncontrollable giggles, etc. Fanning, whose work in prior films showcased her enormous range as an actress, appears lost in this debacle. For the last forty minutes her face is crinkled up as if she were aware of a terrible odor (probably coming from a nearby copy of the script).
Elisabeth Shue and Amy Irving play rival mothers who spar on behalf of their respective children. In one overwrought scene they tangle over how the kid who is “it” should count (Shue favors the crude “One one-thousand” cadence while Irving lobbies for the melodic “One-Mississippi”). Given the half-baked nature of this movie, they should have settled on “one potato.”
Dylan Baker does a competent job as the coach hired to give Fanning private hiding lessons, but the role seems way too derivative of Rip Torn's wonderful turn in Dodgeball (at one point Baker sends frothing dogs after Fanning, saying “If you can hide from a Weimaraner you can hide from a kid”).
Most distressing, Hide And Seek is just the first of many films that will try to mount the Dodgeball bandwagon. Miramax has already rushed into production Gwyneth Paltrow in Jane Austen's Hopscotch, while MTV Films has green lighted the racy Spin The Bottle and attached Ashton Kutcher to the un-PC Smear The Queer. Luckily, it only takes a couple of duds to kill a fad, so the release of Hide And Seek gets us halfway to home base. Keep listening for the okay to return to theaters: a hearty “ollie ollie oxen free.”
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