Think “Superbad” with a de-aging ray, and you’re close to the central appeal of the new tot-raunch comedy “Tiny Fugitives.” Makes sense, of course, as Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (same with prior kid-cursing comedy “Good Boys“) serve as executive producers on this one—the two troublemakers at its center even mirror the prior film, with slim, dorky Jacob (Benjamin Pajak) playing the Michael Cera to the Jonah Hill of Aaron Harris’ Charness, who is described (and drawn, via AI, by a bullying classmate) as a “curly-haired soup dumpling.” “Fuck those kids, and fuck ChatGPT,” he growls.
But instead of high school seniors trying to plan their adult lives together, the kids of “Tiny Fugitives” are preteens desperate to stay in Neverland. (Their Neverland, of course, being an expensive $8,000 Jewish summer camp, where the kids feel like kings in ways their ordinary lives never allow them). So desperate, in fact, to stretch two months out of the year to the rest of their lives, that they’ll rope a few other kids (played by Isa Bernal Steiner, Jai Sounder, and Alyssa Gervasi) into a scheme to give themselves pinkeye so they can be quarantined and escape to an abandoned sister camp nearby (“It’s like a Holocaust museum, but without all the sad parts”). There, they can stay up late and get over the pants handjobs (summer camps, Charness asserts, are where they were invented) till their dying days.
Their only obstacle, of course, is the camp’s sole lifer, fiftysomething Bob (Johnny Knoxville), who’s spent more than half his life at the camp and has grown bitter over being stuck in the same dead-end position while younger bosses (like “Workaholics”‘ Blake Anderson) tell him what to do. Spotting the kids in the middle of their escape plan, he gives chase, and the film’s major stakes involve the kids trying to evade him in setpieces that see poor Johnny electrocuted, slammed into walls, and clinging to the hood of a speeding car.
The “Jackass” comparisons obviously ring loud and clear, though they (and Bob) feel largely vestigial to the bigger story “Tiny Fugitives” is telling. (They do, at least, offer some of the film’s more visually enticing moments, including a slow-motion trust fall of Jacob from an exploding circuit breaker, at one point floating like an angel.)
Writer-director Michael Lewen, an acolyte of Judd Apatow’s who worked on “Trainwreck” and “The King of Staten Island,” among other things, drew on his childhood at Jewish summer camps for his first feature, alongside co-writer Jacob Kaplan. This gives “Tiny Fugitives” a surprising amount of heart amid all the profanity and pratfalls; the film’s middle stretch, where the fart jokes settle down in favor of just letting our escapees enjoy the tranquility they think they’ll want forever, is easily its strongest and sweetest. Here, we see the kids flirt with their idea of adult traditions and rituals, from sucking back Manischewitz to sucking face. Summer camps, after all, are some kids’ first taste of unsupervised adulthood, and Lewen and his cast find plenty of sweet grace notes as they comically fumble through some of these milestones.
That doesn’t absolve “Tiny Fugitives” of some of its greater stumbles, from the overall familiarity of the film’s coming-of-age rhythms (guess which friends are going to come to blows about their respective personality flaws at the end of act two) to the fact that watching kids say the darndest things starts to get pretty old after a while. Still, Lewen and Kaplan lace the jokes, especially Charness’, with enough specificity to feel charming (see: his hilariously incorrect breakdown of what happens during each sexual ‘base’). And it’s not hard to root for this young cast of kids, especially Pajak and Harris, who carry this thing with the weight of seasoned pros and all the panicked neuroses of childhood.
What saves “Tiny Fugitives” from the dustbin of post-Apatow mediocrity is the underlying sweetness that cuts, like a glass of Manischewitz, through all the acid. All the outrageousness, the jokes about Sydney Sweeney and bin Laden and getting jacked off during “Finding Nemo,” is all in service of showing the lives of kids so desperate to grow up that they’ll stay children forever. Like the best coming-of-age movies, we see these kids forced to face the real consequences of growing up: realizing that your childhood friendships may not last forever. Everything ends, including summer camp. Might as well blow some shit up along the way.
