Beyond just offering a cracking mystery, it works as a commentary on small-town Americana and a character study about admitting that your childhood dreams were a myth and/or that you weren’t quite as special as you were led to believe. The film is a pretty straight-up private eye movie, every bit as dark and cynical as you’d expect from the genre, which is why I’m frankly bemused at other critics who were taken aback by the film’s seedier aspects. This premise isn’t played for laughs but rather pathos, drama and tragedy. The main plot concerns a high schooler (Sophie Nélisse) who hires Ape Applebaum to find out who murdered her boyfriend. What makes the film click is that this premise isn’t played for laughs but rather pathos, drama and tragedy. Two decades later, he’s still living with his parents (Wendy Crewson and Jonathan Whittaker), working out of a dingy office solving penny-ante mysteries for pocket change. But after his assistant, fourteen-year-old Grace Gulliver (Kaitlyn Chalmers-Rizzato) goes missing and never comes home, Ape can’t move on with having failed to solve this most personal of cases. Starring Adam Brody, The Kid Detective concerns a former Encyclopedia Brown-like gumshoe who is still at it as a 32-year-old man.Īs we learn in the prologue, young Ape Applebaum (Jesse Noah Gruman) had a knack for solving neighborhood mysteries, to the point where a grateful town set him up with his own office. The likes of Brick and Zero Effect weren’t exactly blockbusters in their day, nor did Mystery Team break out beyond being a “before they were famous” launch pad for Donald Glover, Audrey Plaza and Elle Kemper. Conversely, writer/director Evan Morgan’s surprisingly engrossing little mystery dramedy may be destined for cult status.
That surprisingly winning rom-com couldn’t compete in a crippled marketplace where anyone venturing out to the cinema was likely opting for Tenet, but I hope for the Geraldine Viswanathan/Dacre Montgomery flick to have a healthy post-theatrical afterlife.
Like The Heartbreak Gallery, this was a Sony pick-up specifically for the purposes of providing theaters with fresh content.
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