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| ‘Honey, I Blew Up the Kid’ By Desson Howe Washington Post Staff Writer July 17, 1992 | ||
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In "Honey, I Blew Up the Kid," there's mutation trouble again, with 2 1/2-year-old Adam. But this time, Moranis doesn't need a magnifying lens to find Junior. He just needs to look up.
Hitting on a plan to make his embryonic enlarging machine work, Moranis puts Adam's toy bunny under the beam. But Adam (played by twins Daniel and Joshua Shalikar) wants his bunny back. He gets it, just in time to get zapped.
At first, Adam seems a little big for his car seat. Next thing you know, he's seven feet tall and ripping the cuckoo clock from the wall. Moranis and teenage son Robert Oliveri coax the tot into his room. He comes back with the door in his hands. It gets worse. Whenever the kid passes electronic gadgetry, the electromagnetic aura makes him increase geometrically. He grows to 50 feet and heads for the ultimate electromagnetic high -- Las Vegas.
Well, this is fun and there are few kids who won't have a good time of it. But it's no "Honey, I Shrunk . . ." The first movie was more interesting and inventive, with the tiny kids facing the jungle terrors of a giant lawn and the aerial attack of a zeppelin-sized bee.
"Blew Up," directed by Randal ("The Blue Lagoon") Kleiser, feels narratively limited. It's a one-joke movie: Adam just gets bigger and bigger. All Moranis needs to do is get the shrinker from the last movie and turn it on Adam.
But there are the usual, plot-stretching delays. First of all, the shrinker's stored in an enormous warehouse filled with thousands of other identical boxes. Moranis also has to evade the dastardly clutches of waxy-haired boss John Shea (resembling a malevolent Harold Lloyd), who is trying to thwart him at every turn.
Now a burbling, 112-foot-tall Godzilla, Adam pounds through the neon-lit gambling capital, causing pandemonium among the federal agents, national guardsmen and other amazed onlookers scrambling around his gigantic sneakers. At one point, to get his son to sleep, Moranis perches on the head of Adam's now-gigantic bunny -- itself suspended from a helicopter -- and sings "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" through a megaphone. He and more-than-concerned mother Marcia Strassman have to get Baby to keep still for more than 12 seconds. As any parent knows, that's impossible.
The movie is preceded by the G-rated "Off His Rockers," a five-minute, computer-assisted animated short, in which a wooden rocking horse attempts to coax a child away from the stupefying video screen and back into the land of imagination. Created by 73 artists over two years at Walt Disney Animation Florida, it outshines the feature attraction with an amusing storyline and often-breathtaking animation.
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