“Attention campers. Lunch has been cancelled due to lack of hustle. Deal with it.”

Justin’s rating: Can you imagine the casting call for this movie? “Looking for chubby kids who don’t mind having their weight be the butt of jokes in a feature film that will haunt them for the rest of their lives.”

Justin’s review: Disney isn’t really in the business of making movies these days that aren’t massive hits based on safe IPs. It’s getting harder and harder to remember the company back when it was willing to be more experimental — and when it was unintentionally churning out some pretty significant live action cult hits like Hocus Pocus, Flight of the Navigator, High School Musical, and A Goofy Movie.

To this stable we can add Heavyweights, which was originally ordered to be “The Mighty Ducks at summer camp” but then went through a Judd Apatow (seriously!) writing filter and ended up being a strange, biting, and wickedly fun Ben Stiller vehicle.

Overweight kid Gerry (Mighty Ducks’ Aaron Schwartz) is dismayed to learn that his parents are shipping him off to Camp Hope — a “fat camp” — for the summer season. Yet it turns out not to be so bad: He makes fast friends with the other long-time campers, finds a role model in genial counselor Pat (Tom McGowan), and starts to see the exciting potential of a summer of swimming, go-karting, and eating of the forbidden candies.

This excitement lasts as long as the first night, when the beloved camp owners announce that they’ve had to sell the place to an over-zealous fitness instructor named Tony Perkis (Stiller). Perkin strips away the coddling nature of the camp and institutes martial law to get these chubby bunnies in lean shape by the summer’s end. He doesn’t care about the kids so much as results that he can film and leverage into future sales for his products.

Meals become meager, the blob on the lake is popped, the go-karts dismantled, and troublemakers are shipped off. Camp Hope becomes a hellish landscape for these “heavyweights” — and an opportunity to rise to rebel.

I really enjoyed this brief period of Ben Stiller’s career where he poured his heart and soul into being hilariously evil villains. As with Happy Gilmore, you both hate the guy and find yourself quoting his enthusiastic and sinister lines. Tony Perkis’ dislike of children, narcissistic ego, and zealous passion for results build him up as this great force that must be toppled so we can all cheer before the end credits. I wish we got a few more roles like this from Stiller before he became the good guy in comedies (although we did get Dodgeball in 2004, so I’ll shut up now).

You can definitely see a lot of Mighty Ducks DNA in this movie, with several of the same kids and the gradual transformation from bumbling losers to unexpected victors. But Heavyweights isn’t merely a clone; the summer camp setting is a lot more fun, I’d argue, as is many of the jokes that are funny for adults and kids alike.

And it’s really hard to imagine anyone being brave enough today to tackle a kids fat camp in a movie without being frightened off by the subject. They don’t shy away from the jabs made at their weight, but it’s not quite as mean-spirited as I feared. In fact, by the end of the film the kids may have rejected Tony’s fanatical approach, but they’ve also started to make healthier choices on their own. That’s a good message.

Pack in plenty of other subplots, including a good-natured counselor trying to help the kids, an end-of-summer competition with a rival camp, a dance at a girl’s camp, and the expected revolt, and Heavyweights is surprisingly lean for its runtime.

Don’t get me wrong: Heavyweights is primarily a kids movie with kids’ interests at heart, but it’s a nice take on the summer camp formula that might remind you of both the terrible and great days of yore. And you adults can have a blast watching Ben Stiller taking fitness to ridiculous levels.

Intermission!

• Kids are allowed to trash their schools on the final day of classes
• BoDeans’ “Closer to Free” — a ’90s classic tune!
• 10-cent lemonade… man how inflation has changed the world
• “You’re fatter than I am, why don’t you go to the camp!”
• Ah the days when you could just throw your kid onto an airplane by himself to go to camp
• “Are you ready for the best damn summer of your life?”
• The was a meet-awkward
• That’s a lot of forbidden food hidden away for the insects to find
• “I see the President of the United States of America.” “He’s from England.”
• “I eat success for breakfast! …with skim milk.”
• “Don’t drink the water, he peed in it!”
• He’s packing Pez!
• They killed the blob!
• ’70s dance moves can save any party
• One good dance song, and it’s over
• Josh pretending to be lobotomized
• Wait, did you just slam the Buffalo Bills? C’mon!
• DEVIL LOG
• Tony breaking down and having a Gollum moment as he talks to himself
• Who makes kids go on long hikes with heavy packs?
• “Kiss my butt!”
• “That is so cute!” “Yeah, whatever.” That line reading got a big laugh from me.
• Lars becomes a literal honey trap
• The kid who comes back to punch Lars in the junk
• “He looks like a human s’mores”
• Don’t be suckered by the chocolate kiss

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