Just Like Dad (1995)
Contents
About
Charlie is constantly bullied at school and decides to invite a weightlifter to pose as his father at the father/son picnic. The lie spirals out of control and Charlie ends up the target of a kidnapping due to the weightlifter's troubled past.
Twelve-year-old Charlie Speigel is small, bookish and an easy mark for the bullies at his school. His father Stan is a gentle, mild-mannered man who would far rather talk his way out of trouble than square up to anybody, and Charlie, embarrassed and desperate to fit in, wishes he had the sort of father the other boys boast about.
With the annual father/son picnic approaching, Charlie hits on a plan. He persuades Joe, a powerfully built stranger with a quiet manner and a past he does not care to discuss, to attend in Stan's place. The deception works far better than Charlie expects, and for a short while he enjoys exactly the standing among his classmates he has always wanted.
The lie does not hold. Joe's history catches up with him, and the criminal associates he walked away from take an unwelcome interest in the boy now seen at his side. What began as a small act of playground vanity turns into a genuine threat, and Charlie is left to work out what courage actually looks like, and to recognise it in the father he was ashamed of.
Cast and characters
Wallace Shawn stars as Stan Speigel, the mild-mannered father at the centre of the story. Shawn is best known as Vizzini in The Princess Bride, as the voice of Rex in the Toy Story films, and for My Dinner with Andre. Ben Diskin plays his son, Charlie Speigel, and Nick Cassavetes plays Joe, the weightlifter Charlie recruits to stand in as his father; Cassavetes later moved behind the camera and directed The Notebook.
The supporting cast includes Jarrett Lennon as Charlie's friend Sherwood, Laura Innes as Rose, Michael Tucci as Frank Turner and Brittney Lewis as Annie. George Fisher, Frank Gerrish and Michael Flynn appear as Mole, Crisco and Peterson, the figures from Joe's former life. A complete cast list is given below.
Details
Director: Blair Treu
Writer/Screenplay: Wayne Allan Rice
Producer: Leslie Allan-Rice, David C. Anderson, Don Schain
Tagline: He wanted a superman father... what he got was a super dad!!
Running time: 101 minutes
Certificate: PG
Budget:
Box office:
Genre: Comedy, Drama, Family
Released: 1995 (United States television broadcast November 4, 1996)
Music Composer:
Cast
- Wallace Shawn as Stan Speigel
- Ben Diskin as Charlie Speigel
- Nick Cassavetes as Joe
- Jarrett Lennon as Sherwood
- Laura Innes as Rose
- Michael Tucci as Frank Turner
- George Fisher as Mole
- Frank Gerrish as Crisco
- Michael Flynn as Peterson
- Dane Stevens as Hoffs
- Brittney Lewis as Annie
- Christy Summerhays as Miss Quinn
- Elisabeth Lund as Samantha
- Nick Murdock as Conner
- Bernie Garcia as Ralphie
- Sarah Schaub as Lilly
- Jonathan Best as Rex
- Karl Wayne Simmons as Spit
Soundtrack
Franchise
Related
Trivia
- Michael Flynn, who plays Peterson, and Jonathan Best, who plays Rex, both went on to appear in The Paper Brigade (1996), also directed by Blair Treu.
- Nick Cassavetes, cast here as the muscular stand-in father, is the son of the film-maker John Cassavetes and later became a director himself, most successfully with The Notebook.
- The film has no Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score, having attracted only a single critic review, yet it has drawn a far larger audience response through repeat television showings.
Critical Reception
Just Like Dad received very little critical attention on release and holds no Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score, the site having recorded only one critic review. Audience response has been considerably warmer than that silence suggests: the Rotten Tomatoes Popcornmeter stands at 71% from more than 100 ratings, and on IMDb the film holds an average user rating of 5.9 out of 10 from around 508 votes. It also took two awards.
Viewers tend to describe it as a modest, good-natured family film that is better than its premise implies, with particular praise for the warmth of the relationship between Wallace Shawn's Stan and Ben Diskin's Charlie, and for a story that treats its young lead as a thinking character rather than a prop. The common criticism is that the gangland subplot and action finale sit awkwardly against the gentler father-and-son material.
Reviews
- Rotten Tomatoes Popcornmeter: 71% from more than 100 audience ratings. No Tomatometer score has been recorded.
- IMDb users rate the film 5.9 out of 10 from approximately 508 votes.
- Reviewers repeatedly single out the mutual respect between father and son as the film's strongest element.
- A recurring criticism is that the criminal subplot and action-led ending are a poor fit for an otherwise gentle family comedy.
Links
Production
Just Like Dad was directed by Blair Treu from a screenplay by Wayne Allan Rice, and produced by the Canadian company Cinar. It runs to 101 minutes and carries a PG certificate.
Treu worked repeatedly with the same pool of performers around this period, and two members of this cast, Michael Flynn and Jonathan Best, reappeared in his following film The Paper Brigade (1996). Just Like Dad reached television audiences in the United States on November 4, 1996, and found most of its viewers through television and home video rather than cinemas, which accounts for the near-total absence of contemporary critical coverage against a comparatively healthy audience score.
