Directed by Thor Freudenthal. Starring Zachary Gordon, Robert Capron, Rachael Harris, Steve Zahn, Devon Bostick, Connor and Owen Fielding, Chloë Grace Moretz, Grayson Russell PG cert, 94 mins
GREG HEFFLEY (Zachary Gordon) is a cocky, smart-mouthed 12 year-old with one consuming ambition: to become the most popular kid in middle school. Alas, the inverted logic of the playground dictates that the more he strives for popularity, the further he falls down the rankings.
It does not help that Greg is, by his own estimation, surrounded by imbeciles. His childhood chum Rowley (Robert Capron) is an outsized ginger-haired embarrassment. His older, hipper brother (Devon Bostick) tortures him with low-level horseplay. Even his dad is a goofy enough to be played by Steve Zahn.
These people, Greg decides, are holding him back in a world where hell is other pre-teens. It’s bad enough that he can’t even impress in the Chihuahua division of the wrestling programme and that the more complicated machinations of adolescence are lost on him (“A butt can’t be cute,” note Greg and his baffled friend.) But he’ll never get to lunch with the cool kids if he’s carrying all these freaks and geeks.
Unhappily, our obnoxious hero's perennial mortification soon impacts on those around him. His willingness to dump on Rowley, whom he considers "pretty lucky to have me as a friend", not only jeopardises their relationship, but backfires utterly; now Rowley is the one fitting in, while Greg can't even command the attention of that dorky loner girl ( Kick Ass's Chloë Grace Moretz) from the school newspaper.
Can Greg turn things around? Will life lessons be duly learned? Like every other kids' TV show, Diary of a Wimpy Kidborrows the fourth wall demolition once favoured by Malcolm in the Middle, a device that allows for the central character to directly address the audience and for the audience to see past his occasionally unreliable narration.
Adapted from the Jeff Kinney’s similarly titled illustrated novel and peppered with that book’s doodles, the film is endearingly age appropriate, genuinely funny and cheerily devoid of snark and double coding.
We might have guessed that
Stuart Littledirector Thor Freudenthal would never need to work blue.
