First Kid

To best assess this film, I have to regress to the mental state of a ten year old. This is a long and difficult process, so bare with me… sugar, snot, cartoons, Donkey Kong... done!

Hi. Child Vince here. I wanna be the First Kid. Kids should rule the world. Stupid old people suck. This film is about a kid. His dad is the president of the United States. His dad sucks. The kid, they call him the First Kid, he has a PC, he has a snake, he has a limo to take him to school. I have a stupid pack of Derwents missing the green, an old troll doll without hair and I have to walk to school because my parents said that they used to walk 20 miles to school through snow with no shoes. Old people suck. My parents are old. They suck.

The First Kid gets in trouble all the time. He’s cool. He shows his butt, he gets into fights, but he can’t fight good, but I can, I beat the crap out of my baby sister and the dog, the dog still limps and my sister is just starting to get the use of her arm back.

But First Kid is only a troublemaker because he’s so lonely. His stupid sucky dad is too busy to see him, his stupid sucky mum is always on his back over making trouble for his dad, and the dickwads at school pick on him all the time because his dad is the President. And the Security guy who looks after him is a dickwad. So he gets fired. Then they get a guy called Sinbad to look after him. He’s cool. But he’s old, so he sucks. But not in a really bad sucky way, he kinda only half sucks.

Then he tries to make friends with First Kid, he teaches him boxing so he can punch crap out of the school bully and lets him sneak out of the White House. First Kid starts being more happy and tries to get a girlfriend.

I gotta pee, hang on a second.

Peeing is cool. Have you noticed that old people don’t pee? They ‘go to the toilet’? That’s why old people are stupid dorks. Except the teacher in the next classroom, Miss Monkton. She’s hot. She wears tight jeans and has big boobies. Last year, I drew a nude picture of her on the blackboard in the empty classroom, and the principal found out and made me say sorry, then she smiled and said it was okay really, she thought the picture was funny. I reckon Miss Monkton likes me.

...beer ...depression ...mortgage... okay, it’s adult Vince back again. This is going off track and revealing a little too much info for a kid's review. Moving right along to the all important transfer analysis...

I have to say Disney have done so much better than this lately. A letterboxed 1.85:1 picture? Is it any surprise then when I say that the very soft picture is rife with fine grain, suffers edge enhancement, aliasing and poor detail? No? No surprise? The print isn’t the cleanest either. The low bitrate doesn’t help, dropping to sub-5mbps fairly often, which does help keep the 97 minutes on a single layer though, if that’s any consolation. Like a kid is gonna care about a layer change. I guess it saves money though, and that is what business is all about, isn’t it? Screw the kids, let's all buy personal jets.

This is a little better than the quality of the picture, but nothing great still. The 5.1 sound sticks pretty solidly to the front of the room, but if you stick your ear up against the back speaker you can hear some low ambient noise. It gets a little better at the rollerdisco party, but nothing exciting happens back there to pull the front and back together.

Nothing.

A so-so film that only fans of Sinbad, Disney and annoying little shits will enjoy. Then again, for a kiddie flick it has a slightly violent ending which is borderline acceptable for the genre, and maybe blurs the line a little for whether this is really suitable for more grown up kids, say early teens, instead. The DVD is a pretty poor quality release in any terms.