Little review: Fun in its own scattergun, small-minded way

Dir: Tina Gordon; Starring: Regina Hall, Marsai Martin, Issa Rae, Justin Hartley, Tone Bell, JD McCrary. Cert 12A, 109 mins

In 1988, Penny Marshall made the fantasy comedy Big, in which Tom Hanks played a 12-year-old boy in an adult’s body. Tina Gordon has taken that concept and reversed it. In the writer and director’s new film Little, a grown-up – Atlanta tech empress Jordan Sanders (Regina Hall) – ends up back inside her 13-year-old self.

Jordan is a thoroughly obnoxious, self-made businesswoman. She treats her employees as if they’re worms, and seems to have more affection for her Alexa-like app (her “homegirl”, as she calls it) than she does for human beings. She is wealthy, glamorous, power-crazed and single. Her drive to reach the top began in earnest when she was a bespectacled, frizzy-haired teenager at school, badly bullied for being such a nerd. “Do you know what happens to smart people when they’re big?” her parents said to console her when she was a tormented schoolgirl. “They become the boss.”

Little is fun in its own very scattergun, small-minded way. But Gordon, who co-wrote the screenplay with Tracy Oliver, gets herself into a bit of a tangle as she attempts to combine adult and kids’ themes in the same movie. When Jordan is trapped inside her 13-year-old body, she still has the same appetites for alcohol, sex and high living as her 38-year-old self. This makes for some uncomfortable and very strange scenes. She hits on her schoolteacher and gets too close to her adult boyfriend. Her biggest issue with being stuck back in her early adolescent body is that she has lost the “natural teardrop boobs” she spent so much money having implanted. She may be in a teenager’s body, but that doesn’t stop her marching through the office in her pink power suit, bossing around all her employees (who have no idea why there is a kid in their midst).

Jordan is played as a 13-year-old by the talented Marsai Martin, who perfectly imitates Regina Hall’s mannerisms as the adult version of herself, while also capturing the schoolgirl’s awkwardness. She may be boss of a big tech company, but when she wanders into the dining hall at Windsor Middle School, no one will sit with her. She is mocked relentlessly by the other schoolkids, who stick straws in her very thick hair.

The writing here is a mixture of the witty and the banal. There are knowing jokes about Gary Coleman, the diminutive and very precocious star of TV’s Diff’rent Strokes. Jordan has a very vicious turn of phrase. At the same time, many of the one-liners here – about how it’s never too late to reinvent yourself, for example – sound as if they could have been taken straight from a Hallmark greeting card.

As well as a story about an adult colliding with her younger self, Little is an odd-couple movie. April (Issa Rae) is Jordan’s assistant and general dogsbody, told by her boss to be on call at all times. As good-natured as Jordan is mean, she plans Jordan’s diary, collects her laundry and soaks up her never-ending insults.

After Jordan downsizes, the power dynamic between the two women is reversed. Jordan becomes ever more dependent on April, whom everybody assumes is her mother. In the film’s oddest scene, when Jordan misbehaves and refuses to go to school, she ends up being spanked by April.

There is a sickly sweet sub-plot involving the other kids ostracised at the school. Jordan becomes their champion and teaches them how to boost their profiles on social media while facing down the school bullies. We know, almost from the opening moments of the film, that Jordan isn’t really the monster that she seems to be. She acts tough and mean to protect herself, but there’s a decent, kind-hearted girl lurking within her. It only takes a few plot twists to pull her to the surface.

One hitch to the structure of the film is that we see relatively little of Regina Hall as grown-up Jordan. The film is generally at its best when she is on screen, behaving at her nastiest. This is one of those wish fulfilment fables in which a transformation, supposedly for the better, risks dulling the heroine. The more emotionally mature she becomes, the fewer laughs she elicits.