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A little voice in the back of your head keeps telling you that you should be hating every damnable minute of this wishy-washy romance; and, most of the time, it's right. Starring two precocious, whiny 10-year-olds (the Olsen twins, well-known if not loved in the US as the stars of TV show Full House) and slightly-past-their-sell-by-date light-comedy leads Steve Guttenberg and Kirstie Alley, it's a contemporary fairy tale that mixes the match-making antics of The Parent Trap with the looky-likey hi-jinks of The Prince And The Pauper.
When posh Amanda and poor Alyssa accidentally bump into each other while temporarily living on opposite sides of the same lake, they conspire to set up Steve and Kirstie, so as to save one from child labour in a junkyard and the other from the hateful boarding school Guttenberg's prospective bride Clarice (Jane Sibbert) will send her to given half a chance.
Food fights ensue, as do race-against-time chases to the altar and convoluted efforts to get Clarice out of the picture and to get the remaining grown-ups to kiss.
It Takes Two is a bad film, then, but not quite as bad as you might have thought. Writer/producer Jim Cruikshank's main intention seems to have been to make a funny family film on a similar level to the recent live-action 101 Dalmatians, and in a limited sort of way he succeeds. There are occasional laughs, and the adult leads (Alley in particular) are likeable enough, but you know from the outset that Cruikshank is putting off the inevitable by keeping Alley and Guttenberg apart, and it's not enough fun until that moment.
But It Takes Two's big problem is that it's just too sugary sweet - - for adults and for kids. You come out of it feeling a bit like Augustus Gloop after he fell into Willy Wonka's river of chocolate, and that's not a pleasant sensation.
An insipid, sentimental and foolish film. Screenwriters need to learn, and write into movies, that kids are menacing, nasty creatures.
