Jack

A twist on the boy-in-a-man’s-body tale from Big – here, parents Karen (Lane) and Brian (Brian Kerwin) are told that their new baby Jack suffers from a rare ageing disorder (which doesn’t exist in real life, of course, just in this film), causing him to age four times faster than normal, so that when he is just ten years old his body is that of a forty-year-old man (who looks remarkably like Robin Williams).
A movie about a boy/man starting fifth grade, making friends and trying to be ‘normal’ seems an odd choice for Godfather/Apocalypse Now director Francis Ford Coppola, and it’s certainly not his best work by any means. It’s a big old shameless weepie that relies heavily on Williams’s comic talents to keep it on track, and while there are poignant moments as both Jack and the audience realise he may not live longer than his teens, ideas about how he would spend his days, and his interaction with the kids and adults around him, are sadly wasted. A missed opportunity, and one for Williams fans only.