Director Michael Davis’ “Beanstalk” has a lot of balls in the air. It wants to squeeze in so many ideas and sub-plots and can never find a proper way to bring them all in to one coherent kids film. There’s a boy named Jack who lives with his mother and discovers large beans that form a humongous beanstalk. Meanwhile, Jack’s mom is going to lose her house, prompting Jack and his mom to go homeless. Meanwhile, there’s a nutty doctor (Margot Kidder is barely recognizable) who believes the mother goose tales to be real, and is preparing to climb the beanstalk, while an evil land developer is planning to knock down the beanstalk, steal Jack’s house, and develop land over the his neighborhood. That’s a lot story, for a movie barely eighty minutes in length!
And none of it is ever really as entertaining as it has the potential to be. It’s so weird, and feels like writer Davis is trying to pad the run time for a movie that doesn’t need it. We could have really spent the whole movie on Jack’s adventure. And for some reason he’s teamed with school bully Danny, who fights with Jack in the giant world a la Bugs and Daffy. When Jack and the bully climb up the beanstalk, the giant world is just another suburban household set, except we get to see Jack and Danny playing with large props that create the illusion they’re small. So there’s a fork handle in the crotch gag, Jack hurling pepper at the giant, and the giant trying to smash Jack under his table cloth. For some odd reason the giant also has a demanding daughter he’s trying to please, and has wicked intent for the land below, when he discovers it.
“Beanstalk” also seems to want to be meta, in which it creates a world that’s kind of like the fairy tales, but not really. There’s Jack and his mom, there’s an old woman who lives in a shoe, Kidder’s character is referred to as mother goose, and Jack has a red hooded female friend who proclaims “My what a big box you have!” I’m not sure what the idea was behind these nods, but it could have really worked as a meta-fairy tale, if it dropped all the other unresolved junk by the wayside. JD Daniel and Patrick Henna do solid jobs in their respective roles considering their characters are so broadly written. Michael Davis’ “Beanstalk” is by no means terrible. It’s silly, surprisingly convoluted, and may have been much better if it ever figured out what kind of movie it wanted to be.