Man of the House (1995)

Jack moves in with his girlfriend, who is divorced and has a 11-year-old boy named Ben from her previous marriage. Ben does everything he can to scare away his prospective stepfather. Meanwhile, the latter, who is a Federal prosecutor, is being targeted for revenge by the son of a Mafia boss he sent to prison.

This is a very lame comedy, but there are occasional glimpses of what might have been a better movie, if all the ridiculous dances and all the moralistic sap were weeded out of it. The earlier part of the movie suggests a perversity which could turn into something interesting. One of the better comic points has a school kid being repeatedly locked inside a locker by bullies. At one point, he and Ben, who tried to help and suffered the same fate as he, talk from inside their respective lockers:

Kid #1: You know, it's not so bad in here. It's kind of peaceful.
Kid #2: Yeah, it's amazing how you get used to it after a while.

Another interesting point of the movie is how the three main ethnicities that formed the U.S.A. are represented in the movie. When Ben tells his school chum that he and his stepfather have joined an Indian Guides program and are going out on a camping tour, Ben's friend, who is black, comments:

Kid #3: I'll never understand why you white people like to sleep outside on the ground. You'll never catch no brothers doing that.

As this film was (apparently) made by whites only, it is only fair to include here the testimony of a black person:

We're Here. You Just Don't See Us

The Native American angle of the movie seems to imply that white people have no culture of their own on which to lean when it comes to restoring their familial wounds. It is ironic how whites would have wiped out most indigenous populations only to appropriate their culture for therapeutical purposes. But of course the movie will not come anywhere near such problematic points.

But, as I said, there is a good movie lurking somewhere inside Man of the House. The intertwining of the two subplots of Child vs. Stepfather and Thugs vs. Prosecutor is not a bad idea. The latter works most obviously as a catalyst for the resolution of the former, but in my opinion it goes beyond that. There is a psychoanalytic angle in which the thugs represent the stepson's unconscious murderous fantasies. Alternatively, or even concurrently, they represent the stepfather's fears concerning his stepson. But, again, to make it work it would be necessary to remake the movie and steer it in a new direction.

Rating: 30