Mark Reviews Movies: KIDS VS. ALIENS

Kids vs. Aliens, RLJE Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 19, 2023

The main joke of Kids vs. Aliens is that youngsters aren't nearly as innocent and full of wonder as the movies might make it seem. That's the case with these young characters, at least, because they haven't been raised on fanciful and hopeful science-fiction but on a diet of video games, action movies, and professional wrestling. When aliens invade the planet, these kids don't stare with wide eyes. They're too busy swearing in disbelief and anger. When some extraterrestrials abduct them and their friends, the results are pretty gruesome, because the aliens mean business and so, too, do the kids.

It's not much of a joke, and because co-writer/director Jason Eisener hasn't thought much beyond that gag, this isn't much of a movie, either. The thing runs about 70 minutes without the closing credits, and Eisener and co-screenwriter John Davies struggle to keep matters moving even in that brief an amount of time. Once one figures out what the plot and tone and approach eventually will be, there's little to engage with or surprise in this thin and intentionally cheap genre exercise.

By the way, the title more or less gives away everything about the movie in the first place. The main characters are a trio of best friends—Gary (Dominic Mariche), Jack (Asher Grayson), and Miles (Ben Tector)—and the lead boy's older, teenaged sister Sam (Phoebe Rex). Together, the four make homemade movies that feature some of their favorite things, like alien dinosaurs, lots of violence, and even a climactic wrestling match.

The movie we're watching looks slightly more expensive to make than the one these kids are producing with whatever they have on hand at the time. Since Gary and Sam's mostly absent and emotionally negligent parents (played by Jonathan Torrens and Alexandra MacLean) are wealthy, some of their cheap props look just as convincing as the "real" aliens and their assorted tech. The cheapness, apparently, is supposed to be part of the charm here, although there's an unavoidable disconnect in the way Eisener draws so much unnecessary attention to it with the whole self-referential nature of the kids' hobby.

It feels mean and unnecessary, then, to point out the movie's limitations of budget, since that seems to be part of the point. How can one avoid, though, that it's obvious there are less than a handful of actors playing all of the aliens, even before the credits confirm that suspicion? How can one overlook the rubbery texture of the alien hands and masks or the distinct impression that the extraterrestrials are wearing department store slacks? How can we really become caught up in an over-the-top tale of a kids battling invaders from another planet when there are maybe four total locations in the whole story, with only one of them being the dark, fog-filled, and mostly obscured interior of the invaders' interstellar ship?

The inherent issue isn't the limitations, of course and especially because Eisener clearly wants us to chuckle at or with the fake-looking monsters, the plastic-looking weapons, and, despite the rather gory results of the stuff, the food-color slime that the aliens use to transform or dissolve their victims. The main problem is that there's no sense of imagination behind any of these elements, any of this humor, or any of this story, which takes an unfortunately lengthy time to get to the fight promised by the title.

A lot of that time, oddly, is spent dealing with Billy (Calem MacDonald), an older bully whose behavior—of torturing the younger kids and manipulating Sam for sex, while using that sex to manipulate her, too—is discomforting and awful in a way that adds yet another layer of disconnect from the attempted fun of the material. Billy convinces Sam to have a party at her house while her parents are away again, and as Gary and his pals plot revenge against his sister and the bully, aliens arrive with fiendish, if unclear, intentions.

The result is a lot of hiding, chasing, and fighting, while the humor amounts to noticing how inexpensively the movie was made, how often the kids swear, and all of the cheesy one-liners they say in the heat of battling these creatures. Kids vs. Aliens tries to survive on the supposed strength and cleverness of its gimmick, but it's neither strong nor particularly clever in the first place.

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