Absolutely ordinary, within the standard of any light family comedy of the late 90's. Maybe that's why it ended up forgotten.
This is another one of those endearing family films from the 90's that made their way to the small screen, and disappeared completely once they left the TV channels. It is a film that I believe very few will remember. I saw it at the time, I forgot about it, and I only remembered it again when I found it by chance, and I decided to see it again, these days.
The script is as predictable and cliché as it can be, but it retains some elements that don't let us hate it, namely the sympathetic way in which it approaches us and tries to create a family story, a light comedy about maladjustment, where a boy born and raised in the Venezuelan jungle ends up traveling to New York, the birthplace of his recently discovered biological father. There are some subplots in the middle, necessary for the film to have more support, because the main plot is too thin to stand on its own. Thus comes the whole business of trading coffee futures with mobsters, or that obnoxious character who is the boy's father's future bride. There are still some scenes, obviously demonstrating the boy's inadaptation to the city and urban society.
The film is far from being good, and it shouldn't have left any special good memory in the minds of anyone involved in the project. However, it has a terrible comic exercise by Tim Allen, who is the main actor and the protagonist of the entire plot. He overacts, he's ham, he tries to be minimally funny. He doesn't always succeed, but the effort is there. Martin Short isn't better, he's just dumber, but these movies need the protagonist to have an idiot sidekick to do something even more stupid than he would do without him. Sam Huntington was a casting error. He may even be the son of two Caucasians, but he would fatally be very tanned in the equatorial climate where he was born, and the young actor is white as milk. His romance with Leelee Sobiesky, while having all the usual touches of a teenager's first crush, doesn't quite convince us.
Technically, the film is absolutely regular. As regular as a light-hearted late 1990s family comic film can be. The cinematography, the sets, the costumes (even the ones in the jungle, where the Indian women were asked to cover up tribal nudity), everything is absolutely and perfectly ordinary and does not bring us surprises.
