The Kid Detective: Ace Mystery/Comedy Way More Complex Than its Title Suggests

By Thom Ernst

Rating: A

Watching The Kid Detective reminds me of Bobcat Goldthwait’s World’s Greatest Dad (2009). Not because the films are similar in theme, but because their misleading and yet ironically accurate titles belie the acerbic nature of their stories.

I did not expect The Kid Detective’s caustic departure from its Nickelodeon-ish title, just as I did not expect World’s Greatest Dad’s scathing twist on a popular coffee-mug slogan.

Of the two films, World’s Greatest Dad is by far the more outrageous, but the jagged edges on The Kid Detective are sharp enough to rip through any dismissive assumption that this is just another throw-away comedy.

The Kid Detective is a mystery-comedy with a dollop of pulp fiction in its DNA. And though the narrative pushes close to the edge of parody, it never entirely trades in its innate pathos for easy laughs.

Even so, the oddball characters and genuinely bright, warm feel of the movie washes out some of the shadows that the film carefully puts in play. I would implore anyone watching The Kid Detective not to allow these shadows to go unnoticed, for the heart of this film is in its shadows. A comedy, yes, but a comedy that runs a winding course through death, betrayal, heartbreak, trauma, and innocence both found and lost.

Adam Brody stars as Abe Applebaum, a fallen celebrity whose career as private detective peaks at age 12. Now 32, Applebaum is still a private eye, but where he was once a local hero working out of a treehouse, he is now the town loser nursing hangovers between solving cases of missing pets and outing people’s closeted fathers.

Read our interview with Kid Detective stars Adam Brody and Sophie Nélisse

But Applebaum is not one to take failure laying down, unless, of course, it’s after an all-night bender, or having been knocked out cold from a former high-school bully still carrying a grudge or slumped on a couch unable to beat a debilitating depression.

Brody is excellent in the title role. He plays his hang-dog detective with the unambitious gait of a crude Columbo with an angry disposition and a nasty drug problem.

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

For the first portion of the film, the characters exist in a Nickelodeonesque sitcom. The young Applebaum’s (Jesse Noah Gruman) treehouse is a structure the kind you only see in episodes of Leave it to Beaver and Little Rascals.

In these opening scenes, writer/director Evan Morgan, who co-wrote The Dirties (2013), spikes up the fantasy with cute clean-cut, family-friendly sweetness. But when a young girl goes missing, things turn un-cute very quickly, and the sweetness that was The Kid Detective takes a dramatic downturn.

Brody’s refusal to divorce the child from the man is striking. Applebaum is more adult as a child than he is as a man, and Brody’s ability to incorporate both ages—the younger with the older—adds layers to his performance.

But Applebaum is not the only one affected by his failure. His adoring parents, played by Wendy Crewson and Jonathan Whittaker, are lost in their efforts to help their adult son, who they bail out financially (and literally) even while claiming that they are not going to bail him out.

And there is Lucy (Sophie Nélisse) who shows up unexpectedly at his office like a femme fatale from a Sam Spade novel. Only she’s no femme fatale but a naïve high-school girl with a difficult case to solve: the murder of her boyfriend. It becomes the most critical case of his career.

Morgan occasionally borrows from the hard-boiled private-eye handbook. But for all its gumshoe references, Kid Detective is not a throwback to the film noir of the 40s, certainly not in the same way as, say, Rian Johnson’s Brick (2005).

The Kid Detective is a story that effectively, though inadvertently, details the loss of childhood and the malignment effect of childhood trauma. Angle the perspective and this mystery-comedy becomes a profound statement of who we are, where we are, and how we got here.

There is, in its final scene, a moment of note that I won’t reveal. However, Brody openly speaks of it in interviews, so, it’s easy enough to find. It provides a robust and satisfying conclusion to the story that drives home the film’s emotional impact and brings all the hidden shadows to light.

I thoroughly enjoyed Kid Detective. It’s not the kind of picture that wins awards, which is too bad because nestled within a traditional tale of a detective in need of redemption, is a story surprisingly unique and humane.

The Kid Detective. Directed by Evan Morgan. Starring Adam Brody and Sophie Nélisse. Opens in theatres November 6.