Hurling obtuse insults at everyone he meets, Russell Duritz (a dour Bruce Willis) is an image consultant with G-rated impatience for the world at large. Enter Russell, age eight (Spencer Breslin, only slightly less annoying than I had braced for)--Duritz's chubby younger self has somehow materialized to teach him a few Valuable Life Lessons. The trouble with a hyped-to-the-gills high-concept movie is, of course, that by the time we're lining up to see it, we've accepted the central conceit--the fantasy premise is why we're there. Thus, the wait for a protagonist to come to terms with what we already have can be excruciating, as it is here. Disney's The Kid's (dig that corporate mouthful) remaining plot concerns the two Russells trying to determine the cosmic moral of their unlikely meeting, with both of them equally appalled by how the other lives his life.

Perhaps a quicker tempo would better disguise the absence of a rewarding structure; not for nothing does the film's hack director, who also helmed the plodding chance-encounter stories While You Were Sleeping and Phenomenon, have the word "Turtle" in his name. In all fairness, Willis' innate chemistry with children, sporadic laughs, a rapturous supporting turn by Emily Mortimer (as the adult Russell's British love interest), and a sweet coda almost save this saccharine mid-life crisis fable in a Disney suit from being a totally forgettable fizzle.

I'm about to discuss a pretty out-there notion in terms of the average moviegoer's grasp of psychology: the hard cut vs. the fade out. I have retained some affection for The Kid because it ends with a hard cut to black following said winning closer. Fade-outs let us off the hook; they're a visual exhale, easing us gently into the credits--and, by extension, ourselves. The sudden appearance of black, on the other hand, enables the final shot to linger in our imagination a while longer and more vividly. The same thing happens when we shut our eyes fast after staring at bright surroundings.

It is surprising that Jon Turtletaub took the less traditional pathway out of the film, since everything that precedes the epilogue is steeped in hoary, "enchanting" cinematic devices so recognizably proto-Spielbergian that even Spielberg himself isn't using them anymore. The Kid's weird premise, however, is vintage Disney, harking back to the era of Freaky Friday and The Cat from Outer Space.* Mix the two approaches and you've got a brain-rotting concoction of wonder and schmaltz that works marginally better than one might presume.-Bill Chambers

*Screenwriter Audrey Wells ducks issues of paradox by positioning her tale as one of magic realism instead of science-fiction, an honourable attempt at avoiding the trappings of bargain basement time-travel thrillers like Frequency. Yet her script, full of token and neglected fantastical elements (such as an omnipotent red ultralight--a prefab marketing hook if there ever was one) is so shiftless that I began longing for the convoluted babble of Back to the Future's Doc Brown, who would have a field day with Russell's predicament.