First Kid (Retro)

FIRST KID (1996) PG 101 Minutes Director: David Mickey Evans Writer: Tim Kelleher Sinbad, Brock Pierce, Blake Boyd CAST Sinbad...Sam Simms Brock Pierce...Luke Davenport Blake Boyd...Dash Timothy Busfield...Woods Art LaFleur...Morton Robert Guillaume...Wilkes Lisa Eichhorn...Linda Davenport James Naughton...President Paul Davenport Fawn Reed...Susan Lawrence Zachery Ty Bryan...Rob McArthur Bill Cobbs...Speet

In seventh grade, our teacher rewarded us with a movie day. The choices: FIRST KID or JACK. Some troublemaker in the back blurted out, "I don't want to watch JACK...off," which got the whole class laughing and settled the vote immediately. We watched FIRST KID instead. Having now seen both movies, I think we made the right choice—but just barely.

FIRST KID is a Disney comedy about Luke Davenport, the president's 13-year-old son who's lonely, friendless, and determined to make life miserable for his Secret Service detail. After one agent gets fired for being too rough with Luke, Sam Simms, played by Sinbad, gets assigned to protect the kid. In the role, Sinbad is charming and doing his best with thin material. It should work. Except there's one problem: Luke himself is nearly impossible to root for.

The president's son is a dorky twerp. Not in a Milhouse way—just unlikable. He whines, he sulks, he treats everyone around him like garbage. The movie knows this is a problem, so it tries to compensate. Luke has a Bearded Collie that gets squeezed into more scenes than necessary—something for the audience to care about. There's also a pet snake for comedy and chaos. Disrupting social functions. Messing with keyboards. Keeping things moving when Luke isn't interesting enough. Multiple pets aren't character details—they're damage control.

Sinbad's like an enthusiastic puppy in a household of depressed people—big eyes, endless optimism, just trying to make everyone smile. He's charming and fully committed, even when the movie boxes him in with Secret Service protocol and bland buddy-comedy material. The Dunkin Donuts bit at the mall is solid. His dance moves during the "Fantastic Voyage" scene are genuinely funny. As an executive producer, you can tell he's calling some of the shots—he picked his jam and made sure it had some bounce.

The soundtrack follows Disney's mid-'90s budget strategy—75% generic filler, 25% real standouts: Devo's "Girl U Want," Chill Rob G.'s "The Power," and "I Want to Take You Higher." The rest is elevator R&B and knockoff covers. The school dance scene plays "I Can Love You Like That," but it's not the All-4-One hit version everyone knows—it's the Diamond Mike/Joey Richey cover Disney licensed on the cheap. Same song, same words, zero of the harmonies that made the original work. They couldn't afford the real thing, but somehow they got Bill Clinton and Sonny Bono for cameos. Classic Disney priorities: skip the music licensing, book the sitting president. As if he needed the paycheck.

Zachery Ty Bryan plays Rob, the school bully, and he's surprisingly good at it. Maybe too good. He's not just generic mean—when he calls Luke's dad a draft dodger right before their fight, it's got actual bite. You almost root for him, which says something about how weak Luke is as a protagonist. The irony, of course, is that Bryan himself now has assault charges. So the bully actor became—well, you get it.

The plot hinges on Luke chatting with a stranger online—Mongoose12, who turns out to be Woods, the fired Secret Service agent. He's bitter about losing his job after failing his fitness-for-duty evaluation, and by the time he's pointing a gun at Luke in the mall, he's convinced the kid ruined his life. It's insane villain logic, but at least it's motivation. The movie spells it out from the start: Luke's username is Viper Boy, his internet pal is Mongoose12—snake and mongoose, natural enemies. Not exactly subtle. What's more dated is how casually everyone treats internet stranger danger. Simms asks someone to look into Mongoose12, but there's no urgency, no real concern about Luke chatting with a stranger at all. This was just plot in 1996. Today I'd expect Chris Hansen to meet Woods at the mall.

The movie's grasp on technology is hilariously shaky. Luke wears a tracking necklace that apparently has infinite batteries—no charging, no replacement, just perpetual surveillance. At one point, Luke gets a wrist tracker—like he's on house arrest for his second DUI—and slaps it on the dog to fool everyone. Then there's a scene at the mall where a bunch of kids gather around to watch Luke play with clunky 1996 virtual reality tech, like they're courtside at a Celtics game. The whole movie feels like it was written by someone who heard about the internet and technology secondhand and just hoped it would all work out.

For a light Sinbad comedy about a lonely kid learning to make friends, FIRST KID gets surprisingly violent at the mall. The movie sets it up early—Wilkes gets on Simms for not wearing his bulletproof vest because it "causes chafing," then later tells him about getting shot protecting Reagan. So the film is building to Simms getting shot all along. In the modern world, a family-movie climax with bullets flying and people screaming hits very differently than it did in 1996. Even then, the sequence was jarring. It ends with Sinbad taking a bullet—and then everyone goes to the park to play hockey.

And then there's Brock Pierce himself. The kid from FIRST KID retired from acting at 16, became a cryptocurrency mogul, ran for president in 2020, and is now generously described as a creepy billionaire. So the movie about the president's son stars an actual future presidential candidate—just not the kind Disney was hoping for. It's another layer of darkness on a movie that was supposed to be harmless fun.

Luke is a black hole of charisma. Everything else in the movie—Sinbad's charm, the Bearded Collie, the pet snake, and 25% of the soundtrack—exists to compensate for the void at the center. The movie knows it. That's why it keeps throwing animals and energy at the screen, hoping something sticks. It's formulaic Disney moviemaking held together by Sinbad's effort and sheer wishful thinking. When the protagonist is this unlikable, no amount of "Fantastic Voyage" or Dunkin Donuts scenes can save it.

It's Black History Month, so naturally I had to review a movie with Sinbad. I'm probably only going to say this one time in my life: Sinbad is not the problem with this movie. Everything else is. FIRST KID works in scattered moments, but it can't overcome its fundamental problem—you're spending 101 minutes with a kid you don't like. Surrounded by darkness the movie never intended. That seventh-grade vote between this and JACK? Still the right call. But just barely.

Final Verdict: 52 out of 100

The Wrecking Crew

THE WRECKING CREW R 122 Minutes Director: Ángel Manuel Soto Writer: Jonathan Tropper Jason Momoa, Dave Bautista, Morena Baccarin CAST Jason Momoa…Jonny Hale Dave Bautista…James Hale Temuera Morrison…Governor Peter Mahoe Claes Bang…Marcus Robichaux Jacob Batalon…Pika Frankie Adams…Haunani “Nani” Palakiko Miyavi…Nakamura Morena Baccarin…Valentina Roimata Fox…Leila Hale Stephen Root…Detective Rennert / Sergeant Karl Rennert Maia Kealoha…Lani Lydia Peckham…Monica Robichaux David Hekili Kenui Bell…Alekai Mark R. Black…Monty Josua Tuivaralagi…Kai Stephen Oyoung…Akihiko

THE WRECKING CREW needed to do exactly one thing: let Momoa and Bautista be themselves in a buddy action comedy. That’s it. That’s the whole ask.

For about twenty minutes, it almost works. The opening has a loose, easygoing rhythm—clichés included—like the movie briefly knows what it is. Then something shifts. Simple setups get tangled. Key information gets withheld until the third act, not for suspense but because the script can't figure out when to say it. The early momentum disappears. What replaces it: scenes where characters tell each other things they already know purely so the audience can catch up. It’s storytelling that arrives breathless and scrambling, like trying to finish an assignment ten minutes before class starts.

That scramble becomes unavoidable near the end, when the movie stops pretending and just dumps the entire plot in one rushed conversation. Marcus Robichaux wants to build a casino resort in Hawaii—on Hawaiian Home Lands, no less. Gambling needs legalizing first. The governor's been bought for twelve million. Yakuza muscle gets imported for enforcement. The father dug up financial records through Robichaux's wife. A kid downloaded the dirty transactions. Torture happened. Murder followed. It's delivered at auction speed, frantic and graceless, as if someone suddenly remembered this information was supposed to matter.

The characters operate on the same convenience. James is positioned as hyper-competent—former SEAL, always three steps ahead, the kind of guy who reads a room before he enters it. Except he walks into a house where someone's missing and his kids are hiding, and doesn't register that anything's wrong until a phone call explains it to him. He also keeps an unlocked weapons stash in a house with children, not because it reflects who he is, but because the next scene needs firepower. His competence flickers on and off depending on what the plot requires in that exact moment.

The tone never settles on what kind of movie it wants to be. There's a scene where they infiltrate a party in Hawaiian shirts, played for pure cartoon logic—total farce. But everything around it insists on being taken seriously. People are dying, lives are unraveling, and yet we're supposed to accept both the goofy disguise routine and the weight of their murdered father. It wants HOBBS & SHAW’s irreverence one minute and genuine stakes the next, but keeps hedging between them instead of choosing.

What makes this more frustrating is how much raw material is sitting right there, unused. Jason Momoa has the kind of natural charisma where you’ll watch him do anything—here, he's playing Jonny like the fun brother who never quite grew up—but the movie barely lets him breathe. Dave Bautista is locked into restrained, responsible dad mode as James, and that could be a smart contrast, but their dynamic never gets enough space to build.

Meanwhile, their father—whose death is supposed to motivate everything—was apparently a terrible dad. Jonny even says something like “he wasn’t a father to anyone.” The movie still expects us to care about avenging him anyway, as if that detail doesn’t complicate things.

The ending plays out with that oddly detached FAST & FURIOUS casualness, where the movie just sort of stops. Big stakes dissolve in seconds, consequences vanish offscreen, and everyone wanders away like they’ve got other plans. After all the plot scrambling and the tonal mess, the finish feels indifferent—like even the movie ran out of patience for itself.

I watched THE WRECKING CREW twice, which is once more than necessary. The second viewing doesn't add clarity—it just makes the shortcuts sharper and more irritating. It's not a disaster. It's something more deflating: a movie that takes two actors who should have made this easy and turns it into a chore.

Final Verdict: 43 out of 100