MILK MONEY has a lot going for it. It has two stars I like,
Melanie Griffith and Ed Harris, and has an interesting plot. If you
have seen the trailers, you know it has a lot of good comedy.
On the other hand, this is a schizophrenic movie. It can not make
up its mind if it is a movie for the early teen set or its target
audience is grownups. Every time the script starts to click in one
direction, it stops entirely and switches. You get to like the movie
and you start laughing, and then it enters another slump almost as if
it is scared to follow through with the courage of its convictions in
either direction.
The movie is about a little boy, well played by Michael Carter,
and his 7th grade friends. They hire a hooker, played poorly by
Melaine Griffith. Carter tells his Dad, played okay by Ed Harris, that
Griffith is their math tutor. There is then a gag that runs through
almost all of the show where Harris talks to Griffith about her
profession thinking she is a math tutor while she thinks he knows she
is a hooker. This part of the plot works very well and produces a lot
of laughs.
Notice in the show that Harris is shorter than Griffith. This is
not unusual, but normally, they are careful with the camerawork to mask
the difference by the direction of the shots. Here it is okay to be a
shorter man. Even the kids in the show have girlfriends taller than
them. I especially liked this aspect being to some extent a height
challenged male.
Much of the show is devoted to a romance between Harris and
Griffith which is not played in a believable fashion, and there is no
real chemistry between them. There is another boring and unnecessary
subplot about bad guys wanting to find Griffith. This subplot seems to
be from another movie and to have gotten stuck in this script by
mistake.
Worst of all is the depiction of what it is like to be a single
Dad. It depicts cliches of single Daddydom whereby the son and Dad
microwave TV dinners for 100% of their meals and always race, stopwatch
style, to see who can gobble down their dinners the fastest. The Daddy
has no clue on how to find a woman to date until the kid brings him
one. Oh yes, and of course, the Dad is also an environmentalist trying
to save part of the world. Chaining himself to his car to save a swamp
is certainly the low point of the movie.
I had a pretty good time at the movie since much of the comedy
part did work, but I should point out that if you have seen the
trailers, you have seen half of the jokes already. I can not bring
myself to actually recommend MILK MONEY, and I give it **. It runs
1:50 and is rated PG-13 for a little bit of profanity. Actually, I
think that kids around the 7th grade area would probably get a kick out
of the show and for that age group alone, I would give it a mild thumbs
up.
Copyright © 1995 Steve Rhodes