Little review: a baffling body-swap farce that dates even as you watch it

Dir: Tina Gordon. Cast: Regina Hall, Marsai Martin, Issa Rae, Justin Hartley, Tone Bell, JD McCrary. 12A cert, 109 min

Regina Hall, at the age of 48, has only just started being top-billed in films. She received heaps of plaudits in America last year for her role in the bittersweet sports-bar comedy Support the Girls, and she easily deserves the level of stardom attained by Kevin Hart, or indeed Melissa McCarthy, both of whom have ridden a number of cringily sub-par vehicles and got away unscathed.

If reaching that status confers some degree of immunity to flops, Hall should be allowed to get away with Little, the kind of nakedly misconceived high-concept farce that dates even as you’re watching it. As executive producer on this, she has made one particularly shrewd move, giving her on-screen self permission to bail on the movie after barely half an hour. Warming up the joint with broad, bitchy strokes, she’s out of the door before you know it, plotting her next, hopefully preferable, assignment.

How do you rack up a starring role while barely appearing in your own film? By resurrecting the old body-swap tropes of the 1980s, that’s how. For Little’s premise, think 1988’s Big, but inverted: Hall plays a control-freak entrepreneur, Jordan Sanders, who’s magically ported back into the body of her 13-year-old self (Marsai Martin). This isn’t her own wish, but it would be tortuous to explain how it happens, so let’s not. Suffice to say that after a reel or so of being the boss from hell, Hall’s Jordan is suddenly cut down to size when she wakes up small again.

This ruins her day, and ours. Her finger-snapping tyranny isn’t taken seriously when she’s a geeky kid again with huge frizz – no more jumping ahead of the morning coffee queue, and no more tyranny over her PA, the long-suffering April (Issa Rae). But how this tells us anything about the condition of childhood, or adulthood, or anything else, is practically impossible to see. It’s not as if the world bows down before black businesswomen so routinely that they’re gagging, as this film inadvertently suggests, to be belittled and reschooled.

Little is colourful enough, with some inventively weird costumes to distract you from the arbitrary plot. But it has a dog of a script, co-written by the director, Tina Gordon, and Girls Trip’s Tracy Oliver, both scrabbling around fruitlessly for inspiration before and after the central conceit drops.

For all that the film features frazzled brainstorming sessions while Jordan’s employees plan their next technology pitch, it too often resembles exactly the same thing. Let’s try Jordan being bullied at school all over again, or bringing a trio of unpopular kids out of their shells by chivvying them into a talent contest. Or how about April coming out of her shell as an ideas person in her own right, picking up where Working Girl left off? Not one laugh lands during any of the above.

There’s an especially baffling sequence where Rae and Martin’s characters both start singing in a bar, using baguettes as mikes; every second of their duet cries out to be buried in the DVD bonus features. Given the lame surroundings, it’s a wonder these two get out alive, but their energy and spark, especially together, does redeem things – just a little. They’re 20 years apart in age, but make roughly equal bids, wherever possible, to launch starring careers of their own. Perhaps the next time a Little comes along, they can body-swap with some other poor stooge and get out of Dodge.