Rotten Tomatoes score: 29%
What better plot can you imagine for a family feature than a story about overweight children who commit aggravated kidnapping, aided and abetted by three ostensibly responsible adults?
It's all right, I'll give you time to think.
Heavyweights is an odd film, one of a few from its era that straddles the nostalgia line between dopey kids' movie and mid-90s counterculture talisman. Judd Apatow co-wrote it, it was one of Ben Stiller's early starring roles, and Paul Feig (creator of Freaks and Geeks) appears in it. So does Jeffrey Tambor. Even Tim Blake Nelson (from O Brother, Where Art Thou?) has a pointless cameo as a guy who apparently does door-to-door recruiting for a summer camp.
It also reunited the writer and many of the cast members of the Mighty Ducks trilogy, including Kenan Thompson and Goldberg.
Gerry Garner is a husky, sarcastic kid who gets no respect. When his parents send him off to a weight loss camp, he balks at the idea of spending the summer with "a bunch of fat loads." But once he arrives at Camp Hope, his attitude changes. The other big-boned youngsters are nice to him, and counselor Pat is a cool role model who bears a strangely close resemblance to Gerry, to the point that you keep wondering if he's going to turn out to be his real dad.
(He's not.)
But then comes the bad news. The kindly, encouraging camp owners have come upon hard times and filed chapter 9 bankruptcy. (Will their faces ever be red when they discover chapter 9 is only for municipalities.) The camp has been sold to wannabe fitness celebrity Tony Perkis (Ben Stiller), who is "looking forward to interacting with children for the first time" and plans to put the kids in an info-mercial. Gone are the fun camp pastimes, replaced by grueling "Perki-cising" sessions and co-ed dance parties designed for the sole purpose of humiliation.
Not only that, but the campers are told they will be forced to compete in the Apache Relay, an annual athletic contest against the jocks from Camp MVP across the lake. But if this is an annual source of misery, does that mean the kind-hearted former camp owners made the kids participate in previous summers? I'll let you ponder that in the quiet of your study.
When Uncle Tony discovers that the campers have not been losing weight, he reacts by ordering them on a 20-mile hike. The counselors express entirely well-founded concerns, so they all forbid the children to participate in this obviously dangerous activity, and that's the end of the movie.
No, sorry, I was reading the alternate version of the script where not every adult on the planet earth is totally useless. In the real movie, Tony shouts down the voices of reason and the pushover counselors give up immediately.
During the criminally negligent forced hiking activity, the boys hatch a plan to get the upper hand. They set a cartoon booby-trap for Uncle Tony, trap him in a hole, and somehow transport him back to camp, where they lock him in a cage that they have taken the grotesque extra step of electrifying with a bug zapper. When the counselors discover this Lord of the Flies situation, they instantly free Tony, forbid him to interact with the children anymore, call everyone's parents, and recommend the children seek psychiatric care. So that was Heavyweights—
Whoops, there I go again. No, actually the adults decide that unlawful imprisonment is the way to go, so they leave Tony in the cage and take over the camp. After the kids (and Paul Feig) slather themselves in chocolate syrup and spend the night outside in the grass, Pat takes charge and announces that every eleven-year-old camper is now in charge of his own diet. (What could go wrong?) When Parents' Day rolls around, the parents are horrified to learn how badly Tony has been treating the kids, though no one sees fit to mention that he is being detained in an electrified chicken-wire cage in the adjacent building.
Tony's dad (also played by Ben Stiller) is called in to shut the camp down, but all the kids say they'd rather stay on, and Pat is elected to take over. Pat says he's been at Camp Hope for 18 years, and earlier in the movie he said he's been coming every year since he was ten. Are we supposed to believe that this man
is 28? He was actually 36.
So Pat helps the kids prepare to take on Camp Apache or whatever I said it was called in the annual relay games. Fortunately for the Camp Hope team, the games include such events as balloon-shaving and solving math equations in an impossibly short time, subjects at which the boys just so happen to excel.
The final event is a go-kart race. The race begins with a pistol start, but wouldn't that defeat the purpose of a relay competition? What's the point of all the other events if you can't get a head-start on the final race? (Did you ever use to watch Nickelodeon Guts? Let's not get into that.)
Gerry wins the race with the help of an electric fan that launches him into the air and on top of the other kid's go-kart, which (1) would never work; (2) would surely be against the rules; and (3) would have killed the other racer if he hadn't inexplicably had a roof over the top of his kart.
So there you have it. Gerry has had the best damn summer of his life (allowing him to say the D-word), and all the kids have learned a lesson about... self-esteem, I guess. Or self-confidence? Whichever.
Did you know...?
1. In the scene where Uncle Tony uncovers the secret junk-food stash, I always thought it looked funny when Goldberg makes the "Seymour Butts" joke, as if the line was dubbed over in post-production. Sure enough, it was. The original line was quite a bit more risqué—I shall not repeat it here—and would probably have led to a PG-13 rating.
2. In the dance scene, watch carefully and you'll notice that several of the child actors are apparently sharing costumes. There's at least one other kid dressed exactly like Gerry, and two other actors are wearing identical t-shirts. My only theory is that they needed substitute kids due to work-hour limitations, and I guess there were only so many Les Mis shirts to be had.
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