Wayans' world

Reviewed - Little Man: The Wayans Brothers, whose White Chicks dealt so eloquently with contemporary race relations, have squeezed out a film in which one Wayans, inexpertly rendered tiny by apparently unsophisticated computers, plays a dishonest midget posing as a baby to retrieve a large jewel dumped earlier on a middle-class couple.

You probably don't need me to tell you that slamming your head repeatedly against the edge of a heavy pine table will do less terrible things to your brain than a screening of Little Man. True, the brothers' films - soundly unpretentious, breezily uncomplicated - are idiotic in an honest way, but idiotic they most definitely are. Certain aged jokes are here dragged blinking into the sunlight for the first time since the War of the Spanish Succession.

But all that is, as we say, entirely to be expected. What is surprising about Little Man is quite how disturbing it is. One scene in particular will haunt me to the end of my days. Some time into the film, after the baby has become accepted into the household, his supposed mother, lying sated in bed, congratulates her husband on a particularly potent act of love-making the previous evening. The husband looks puzzled. The baby looks happy. The audience, overwhelmed by unavoidable connotations, contemplates a lifetime of drinking to forget. Nothing the bound foetus gets up to in Eraserhead is quite so upsetting.