No matter the intended audience, and lord knows who that is, Kevin Kaufman’s film “Ace the Case” is a remarkably dreadful film. And if the morbidly curious have the patience to see if the picture is able to pull itself together after its shockingly disjointed first ten minutes, spoiler: it doesn’t, and in some ways, manages to be even worse than one would think. To complete even the first act, one has trudge through several humorless and tone deaf opening scenes.
This 90-minute slog centers on an irritably precocious 10 year-old named Olivia (Ripley Sobo) who has recently lost her father in a freak accident. One night after being left in the care of her 17 year-old brother Miles (Aaron Sauter), she watches a kidnapping of her neighbor take place in the early hours of the morning. With their mother out of town, and older sibling completely dubious about what she allegedly saw, Olivia takes it into her own hands to try and discover who is behind the crime, leading her to Detective Dottie Wheel (Susan Sarandon). Together, they search for the missing girl and her captors.
This is a perplexingly made film, stitched hastily together, and one that never once feels the need to justify large numbers of nonsensical narrative leaps and gaps. Sarandon tries her hardest to muster up any form of enthusiasm for a role that is embarrassingly beneath her capabilities. The rest of the cast try and survive the film by reining in the irritability of their characters, but few succeed and the ones that do only in maddeningly infrequent degrees. Sobo has a natural charm that may aid her in the future, but here she is all impossibly wide eyes, a toothy grin and quirky mannerisms. Sauter is a relative newcomer and wears his inexperience on his sleeve, while supporting turns from actors such as Lev Gorn, Marc Menchaca and Ginna Le Vine are far too affected to land as anything other than cartoonish.
With the production value of a Disney Channel original movie and the narrative quality of an “SNL” skit, “Ace the Case” is best avoided by both adults and children. Although rated PG-13,there’s hardly anything too shocking about the actual content of the film (aside from how the entire kidnapping plot is shot). Children deserve better than this for their source of entertainment, with Kaufman’s crude film never seeming to provide a reason to exist.
With a plot about a child who gets caught up in solving a fairly serious kidnapping case, there was always going to be some narrative rule bending, but the inconsistencies are distracting. There’s a nonsensical placement of a giant rabbit, a subplot involving Olivia’s sleepwalking that is used as a gag, an underdeveloped father and daughter relationship that plays a crucial role in the film and, ludicrously, the death of Olivia’s father that jumpstarts the film and ends up being little more than an afterthought.
Perhaps the misguided film was hoping to be this generation’s “Harriet the Spy,” a harmless ‘90s Nickelodeon film that, while unremarkable, at least didn’t talk down to the young audience. Occasionally, one gets the sense though that the film was aiming for a “Nancy Drew” vibe through its young female protagonist filled with gumption, curiosity and level-headed nature that saves the day. Instead, it ends up in the “Agent Cody Banks” bargain bin of filmmaking, a throwaway movie that, for whatever reason, was greenlit.
What might have worked best as a parody instead crashes and burns as a movie that never lands on a tone or even sticks to it. Beginning as a family drama, quickly jumping into strict farce and abruptly shifting into an action packed odd couple film, “Ace the Case” induces genre whiplash. Poorly written and haphazardly shot, not even Sarandon is enough to convince that “Ace the Case” was a mystery ever worth writing, much less solving. [D-]