In Ivan Reitman’s Kindergarten Cop (1990), Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn’t often battle foes his own size; he’s too busy with 20 or so 5-year-olds with a knack for turning rooms into circuses if you’ve turned your back long enough. He plays the title character: John Kimble, a tough-mugged LAPD detective tantalizingly close to taking down a ponytailed drug lord named Cullen Crisp (Richard Tyson) he’s been pursuing for years. The final step to orchestrate the latter’s downfall is contingent on testimony from Crisp’s estranged wife, who’s said to have absconded to the postcard-pretty town of Astoria with their son. They have new names and, supposedly, millions of dollars sneakily swiped from Crisp.
Kimble travels to Oregon with his newly assigned partner, a former teacher turned detective named Phoebe O’Hara (a wonderful Pamela Reed), to attempt something a little harebrained: find the wife by having O’Hara installed as a long-term substitute teacher for the local elementary school’s kindergarten class. But O’Hara is struck with food poisoning on the flight over, forcing Kimble — so hulking that he’d even be a little much as a gym teacher — to take her place. His might is no match for the chaotic energy of the kids he’s tasked with looking after; he can barely handle it at first when one of the class’s particularly adorable students can barely catch her breath telling her new teacher that she needs to go to the bathroom badly but can’t manage to get her overalls off by herself.
The kids are the most entertaining part of Kindergarten Cop; the screenplay, credited to Murray Salem, Herschel Weingrod, and Timothy Harris, often gives space for the kids to be themselves rather than be cute vessels of recitation. Or at least it appears that way especially during what, to me, is the film’s highlight: when, in montage, the kids all tell the camera what it is they think their dads do for a living — an investigative contrivance Kimble presents to them like a typical classroom activity.
Penelope Ann Miller and Arnold Schwarzenegger in Kindergarten Cop.
Kimble will inevitably soften up — learn how to find his mojo in the classroom — though his improvement syncing up to the caprices of the children he’s tasked with will take a backseat eventually to a burgeoning relationship with another teacher. Joyce (Penelope Ann Miller) came to Astoria to refresh with her young son, who’s one of Kimble’s students. Miller and Schwarzenegger aren’t very believable as a couple, but Miller is so appealing in the role — she emanates a fundamental kindness in the part that wins you over — that I came to root for their romance more than I did the permanent putting away of Crisp. The movie’s confluence of genres and tones ultimately works a lot better than you might think.
Kindergarten Cop’s supporting performers consistently eclipse Schwarzenegger, who’s still good in a part that requires him to somewhat shake up his tough-guy image. (The latter is exaggerated in the movie’s opening few moments — he’s dressed not unlike his character in The Terminator series — so that we can really feel it easing as he further drifts into his undercover work.) There are Miller and the kids, but also Reed and Linda Hunt, who respectively play a wise-cracking partner and a no-nonsense principal with perfectly calibrated comic gusto. Reed does the kind of work here that encourages thoughts of a sitcom spin-off doomed to never arrive. I also loved Carroll Baker as Crisp’s stoic helicopter mom who often does his bidding, the white streak in her hair giving her a supervillain-sidekick visual trademark. She puts you in mind of another bad-mom character associated with a film shot in Astoria: Anne Ramsey in The Goonies (1985), who too simulated ruthlessness in a sometimes legitimately scary way that can feel at odds with a movie that spends so much time goofing off with kids.
Astoria feels like another character. It’s not a town Hollywood often zeroes in on, but when it does it tends to be seen the way it is in Kindergarten Cop or The Goonies: so unbelievably picturesque and quaint that it’s not surprising when movie mischief erupts there, as if it were the only logical byproduct of a surplus of peace and quiet. I visited the town a lot with my family growing up (and, to my own chagrin, less frequently now); I can attest that it really is as beautiful as it’s depicted onscreen. The downtown area still has a no-frills old-fashionedness to it. I recommend first going to Custard King — a walk-up custard stand that lets you customize your absurdly creamy dessert nearly however you want — first if you ever visit. But if a trip is really out of the cards, watching Kindergarten Cop, a movie that clearly reveres the town’s time-slowing charm, does enough of a trick.
Peterson Reviews 