Metacritic score: 50
Alissa Wilkinson covered film and culture for Vox. Alissa is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics.
After Little, there will never be any doubt: Marsai Martin (who plays the younger daughter, a tiny sociopath, on Black-ish, and has an executive producing credit on this movie) is a stone-cold comic genius bound for greatness. In Little, she plays 13-year-old Jordan Sanders, who loves science and is bullied so much by her classmates that she vows to show everyone who’s boss.
Which she does, literally, when she grows up to be a successful tech entrepreneur (now played by Regina Hall), who nonetheless grinds her staff and assistant (Insecure’s Issa Rae) into the ground with her demands and lack of compassion. Then one day, she wakes up and discovers she’s 13 again — which means Martin is back, playing to perfection what it would be like for grown-up Jordan to be trapped in her 13-year-old body.
Hall, Rae, and Martin are all virtuosic comedians, and it’s great to see three black actresses in the middle of a big Hollywood comedy that takes for granted that it’s perfectly normal, not a signifier of “niche” entertainment, that they’re the leads. Unfortunately, the movie they’re in doesn’t quite reach the same heights. Combining ideas from movies like Big, 13 Going on 30, and Freaky Friday with some standard-issue studio comedy ideas about Being Your True Self and Learning To Accept Love, Little feels like it’s all over the place, and not in a good way. Still, it’s plenty entertaining, and worth seeing just to watch their performances.
