Tiny Fugitives

by Mike McGranaghan

I grew up watching antiestablishment comedies like Animal House, Caddyshack, Meatballs, and Stripes. They were movies where the lovable “losers” triumphed over the stuffy, snobbish authority figures. Society has shifted, causing comedy of that nature to become less common. We live in a time when gatekeeping is rampant and falling in line is often considered a good thing. Tiny Fugitives is a throwback to those earlier classics. It’s an unapologetically crude movie that delivers old-fashioned laughs.

Jacob (The Life of Chuck’s Benjamin Pajak) and Charness (Aaron Harris) attend a Jewish summer camp every year. Both are misfits, so this is the only place where they feel like they fit in. When Jacob’s parents announce that they’re getting divorced and won’t be able to pay for him to attend next year, he freaks out. That’s when he hatches a plan, convincing Charness, crush Tali (Isa Bernal Steiner), and a few other kids that they should not get on the bus home and simply stay at camp forever. One thing stands in their way: Bob (Johnny Knoxville), a longtime counselor who is determined to force the 12-year-olds to leave.

Tiny Fugitives combines slapstick humor with raunchiness. Part of the plan involves finding a credible way to remain at camp after the buses leave. They decide being quarantined for having pinkeye is the way to go. How to give yourself pinkeye? Stick a filthy toilet plunger on your face, of course. There’s another funny gag involving an attempt to scale an electric fence. Bob gets roughed up a lot of different ways, playing into Knoxville’s Jackass skills. All this is peppered with profanity and misguided adolescent sex talk. Charness, for example, thinks getting to third base with a girl entails “licking her butthole and then having dinner with her parents.” Ah, I remember those uninformed days quite well.

For being so young, Pajak and Harris handle the material well. The R-rated gags never come off as mere shock value because they bring a certain amount of sincerity to them. Tweens are straddling the line between childhood and the first steps toward adulthood. They embrace the ability to do and talk about stuff that was previously taboo. The young stars capture that quality nicely. Knoxville makes a terrific foil for them, playing Bob with super-seriousness that makes his repeated failure amusing.

Director/co-writer Michael Lewen tries to inject emotion into the last act, meaning that the laughs recede a little bit. Even if it pulls a muscle yanking on your heartstrings at the end, Tiny Fugitives captures the comedic “slobs vs. snobs” vibe that entertained many of us in those 1980s favorites. Some will doubtlessly label the movie politically incorrect or in poor taste. Well, yeah, that’s kind of the point, and precisely why I enjoyed it.