Movie Review : The Kid Detective (2020)
* Follow me on: Facebook - Twitter - Instagram *
Making a detective movie is a weird idea in this day and age. The profession is largely obsolete and its historical context forgotten. There are no private detectives anymore. Only people who play detective, which happen to exactly be the premise of Evan Morgan’s feature film debut The Kid Detective. There are no private detectives anymore, but there might be a future of detective movies. Because the world will never run out of crime-solving weirdoes.
The Kid Detective tells the story of Abe Applebaum (the always excellent Adam Brody), a thirty-two years old man who grew up solving mysteries. Since the age of twelve, Abe used his deduction skills to figure out who stole his classmates’ basketball magazines, or who ran off with the school’s fundraiser money. No one takes him seriously until the day a high school girl named Caroline (Sophie Nélisse) hires him to figure out who killed her boyfriend.
It doesn’t matter what it is if you do it right
I’m sure you’ve guessed it, The Kid Detective is a gripping, well-plotted mystery. But who fucking cares, right? It’s the basics. You have to have a gripping, well-plotted mystery to your detective movie, otherwise it’s fucking garbage. It stands out though the other stuff. Mostly through the idea that Abe is a grownup kid who’s still playing detective, figuring out cat disappearances and whatnot. He’s like all the web sleuths out there, except he has an office.
Abe solves mysteries, but there are little to no stakes to them. He helps the people he grew up around with minor inconveniences, which is fucking killing his soul. Abe still wants to feel needed and appreciated like when he was a kid, but his hometown doesn’t need a private detective. Not until a teenager is unceremoniously killed for obscure reasons. This is not only Abe’s one chance at respectability, it’s his stepping stone into adulthood.
So, there are two narratives unfolding in The Kid Detective: 1) Will young Patrick’s killer be brought to justice? and 2) Is Abe Applebaum going to finally become an adult. That is the hallmark of good storytelling. There is not just one, all-encompassing stake. The stakes are personal and universal at once, which allows you to choose the level of involvement you want to have with the narrative. It’s a nice change of pace from Disney’s tired bad-guy-who-wants-to-destroy-the-universe-because-he’s-bad stake.
Growing up weird
I don’t have much negative to say about The Kid Detective. It is not exactly visceral, but it knows what it is and accomplishes what it means to accomplish well. Another fun, subtle thing to it is writer and director Evan Morgan’s keen understanding of small town logic. I’ve grown up in a 7,000 people town and out there, you meet the people you’ll know all your life pretty early. That means who you were as a child is who you’ll be forever.
That shit eats at Abe, but it also made him extremely relatable to me. He’s fighting against his own self-image in The Kid Detective. He’s fighting a battle he can only win at a great personal cost. Small places are monolithic beasts. If you’ve grown up there, you either accept your fate and be who you’ve always been or you seek paradigm shifting events in order to redefine yourself, like Abe. Not everyone will get it, but it will smack you in the face if you do.
*
I really liked this movie. Perhaps it wasn’t an overpowering emotional journey, but it didn’t try to be. It’s fun, smart, nuanced and sometimes even creepy as fuck. I don’t know any detective movie (let alone movies) that have such range. It’s also package with details and subtle jokes that make it extremely rewatchable. The Kid Detective might not single-handedly resurrect the genre, but it would be a great place to start for a revival. Well worth the rental price.
8.4/10
