Mark Reviews Movies: THE KID DETECTIVE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 15, 2020

The premise sounds like a joke: What would it be like if an amateur child detective, a la Encyclopedia Brown or Nancy Drew or one of the Hardy Boys, became an adult but never really grew up? Still living in the same small town and still investigating petty crimes or local rumors, that's the position of the 32-year-old protagonist of The Kid Detective.

He was once a local celebrity, celebrated by some of his peers and even the adults of his little town. Now, everyone has become so used to his gig that nobody cares and a good number of the townsfolk look at him with exhausted pity. The owner of the ice cream shop and confectionary in town may have been grateful that the kid sleuth unraveled the mystery of the missing candy, happily granting the boy a lifetime of free ice cream. How, though, could the businessman have anticipated that he'd have to live up to that bargain two decades later?

The junior detective may have figured out who stole the fundraiser box from the principal's office when he was 12, but 20 years later, the culprit is still mad that the boy's investigation led him to being suspended from school. Whenever the private investigator heads to one of the local bars, he has to keep an eye and an ear out for the thief's presence, because there's a beating in store, otherwise. The simple solution would be for the detective to avoid the bars entirely, but he's an alcoholic. The beatings almost and sadly seem like a welcome relief from the monotony.

It was "adorable," as one woman puts it, when the child gumshoe was caught hiding in a closet whenever someone returned home while he was searching a house—giving himself away with a telltale sneeze. When someone catches an adult man in his or her closet, though, it's enough to get the detective's name back in the local newspaper after a long absence, for sure. It's just that his name is going to be associated with the allegation of being a suspected sex pest.

This is unquestionably funny, but what's surprising about this film is that writer/director Evan Morgan isn't playing it laughs. There's undeniable humor here. It's inescapable when the setup is this clever and inherently amusing, but Morgan and, even more importantly, star Adam Brody play the material straight.

At times, that approach makes the characters, situations, and juxtapositions between the past and the present funnier, but it also imbues this entire story with a startling degree of sadness, regret, and gloom. It's setting us up for the harsh light of reality to finally strike this character, who has lived within his childhood dream for so long that he's pathetic, apathetic, and haunted by his first, real, and likely fatal failure.

After a breezy introduction showing the junior detective in his child-aged prime and solving all sorts of minor mysteries, we're introduced to the adult Abe Applebaum (Brody), who's still investigating matters like a missing cat and whether or not a kid is lying about playing with a professional baseball team over the summer (A phone call to the kid's mother solves that one quickly). One day, after experiencing a couple hangovers and a visit from parents (played by Wendy Crewson and Jonathan Whittaker) who have to remind their son that they won't be helping him financially anymore, Caroline (Sophie Nélisse), a student at the local high school, comes into his office with a real case to solve.

Her boyfriend was murdered—stabbed repeatedly by an unknown killer for uncertain reasons. Surely, the man who has known this town and its secrets for this long can finally solve a mystery that actually matters.

The story proceeds as a convincing enough mystery, involving the local illegal drug trade ("Does it make you feel good beating up a kid," a difficult young drug dealer asks Abe, who responds with an emphatic, "Yes!") and the boyfriend's "concubine" (as one of his jealous friends puts it) and some origami roses. It's primarily a character study, joking about Abe's state of arrested development at first and eventually revealing why—against all reason and evidence that he won't be making anything like a living at the gig—this 32-year-old man continues a childish fantasy. It all has to do with a girl, who was the young Abe's secretary and who was abducted 20 years prior.

Morgan gradually adjusts the film's tone and outlook, as naïve energy becomes jokey cynicism, as that becomes a more introspective examination of Abe's motives and his condition of being stuck in the past, and those concerns suddenly transform into the not-so-junior detective's first confrontation with a series of crimes that he cannot comprehend, explain, or find solace within their ultimate resolution. Brody's performance, which—like Morgan's own approach—never overtly goes for or plays at laughs, is the cornerstone here. He plays Abe, neither as a caricature nor as a parody, but with a sense of tired compulsion, driven only by pain and regret that he refuses to acknowledge.

It's a nuanced performance in a film that surprises in how much nuance there is in its approaches to this gimmick and the modulating tone. It could have been an easy joke, but The Kid Detective instead takes a hard look at its trapped-in-the-past sleuth and a mystery that will either break him out of this cycle or just break him.

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