A friend and I were surfing the digital cable the other night and ran into this obscure little film at about 3 a.m. on HBO. Intrigued by the premise, and the title, we decided to watch a bit of it, and were sucked in. Jacob Two-Two is absolute fun--it has cuteness but with enough darkness to keep it from simply being fluff.
The first thing that caught us was the song that accompanied the opening credits (!), a slow, gravelly song about Jacob--the narration in the film is also done by the singer of this song (not sure who, although the music was done by Tim Burns and Jono Grant), which gives it an off-kilter quality from the start. The actors are good and are used wisely, and constitute a surprising list of talent: Miranda Richardson, Maury Chaykin, Gary Busey (appropriately grotesque as the Hooded Fang), and Ice-T as a rapping judge. Oh, and Matt McKinney of Kids in the Hall fame. Many of these characters are real people that Jacob Two-two encounters in the real world, and become (a la Wizard of Oz) warped players in his hallucination/dream of a world where children are tried and convicted of minor crimes and sent to Slime Island, a place where there is no fun or laughter.
It's a bit creepy, a bit hokey, a bit funny, a bit sad--it's a lot of things, really, and is definitely a film that more people should see. And, last but not least, the young actor who plays Jacob, Max Morrow, is a real find--a better and more naturally sweet child actor than any other I've seen (Jonathan Lipnicki and the Lloyd kid from Episode One come to mind). He makes Jacob cute without being treacly, and this is a delicate thing which could have ruined the film for me. Get him in more good movies, please! And check this movie out--whether for adults or children (I'd say not under eight years old, though--it could be too scary), it works.
