No matter the audience and lord help us with that one, Kevin Kaufman’s film Ace the Case is truly an abominable work of art. For the morbidly curious out there who wish to ‘wait and see’ if the picture gets better after a shockingly bad first 10 minutes, spoiler alert, it gets worse. It’s downright mind-boggling that the filmmakers managed to mess this one up so badly. To get through the first act, viewers would have to trudge through a plethora of tone-deaf, unfunny opening scenes.
This 90 minute tire-some waste is about an annoyingly ‘talented for her age’ 10-year-old called Olivia (Ripley Sobo) who happens to be dealing with the loss of her father due to a freak accident. One night after being babysat by her 17-year-old brother Miles (Aaron Sauter), she witnesses what appears to be the kidnapping of her neighbor in the dead of night. With their mother out of town, and older siblings completely dismissive about what they imagine, Olivia decides to take matters into her own hands and solve the mystery, which starts with her meeting Detective Dottie Wheel (Susan Sarandon). Join them as they work towards locating the missing girl along with her abductors.
This film is perplexingly terrible, with no compelling story to fill the wide narrative gaps, and is stitched together quite hastily. Sarandon tries her hardest to sell effectively zero enthusiasm for a very subpar role that hardly requires any effort. To stay sane, the rest of the cast tries to tone down the annoyingness of their respective characters, with very few coming close to succeeding, leaving only a few maddeningly infrequent degrees of success. While Sobo has an innate appeal, she draws impossibly wide eyes and a toothy grin with bafflingly quirky body language. Sauter, a relative newcomer, shows off his inexperience, while support from well-known actors such as Lev Gorn, Marc Menchaca, and Ginna Le Vine is far too ridiculous to take seriously.
“Ace the Case” should be left undisturbed by both children and parents due to its cringe-inducing story that resembles an SNL skit and lacking value akin to a Disney Channel original movie. The movie is rated PG-13, but the content in the movie is shocking in itself (especially the way the kidnapping storyline is executed). Children deserve to be entertained in a healthier way and Kaufman fails to provide a rationale why his film exist.
Because the film revolves around a child who is determined to solve a tragic kidnapping case, there was guaranteed to be a narrative form of rule-bending. But these inconsistencies in the storyline are troublesome. The illogical positioning of a large rabbit, Olivia’s sleepwalking subplot which serves as a joke, a daughter-father bond that is quite important yet not explored, and the ridiculous premise of Olivia’s father’s death which initiates the movie and is eventually little more than an afterthought.
Who knows what the picture was attempting to accomplish, but it seems like it wished to be this era’s “Harriet the Spy” a 90’s Nickelodeon film that was dull, but at minimal did not condescend its target demographic. From time to time, it does feel like the movie was trying to go for a “Nancy Drew” feel with its spunky young female protagonist, who is wonderfully inquisitive, and a levelheaded heroine. The result, unfortunately, ends up being in the “Agent Cody Banks” bin, where movie toss-outs end up for inexplicable reasons.
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