Honey, I Blew Up the Kid (PG)
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This is the first sequel to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. It came out in 1992, and I saw it once on TV or VHS or something, sometime in the 90s. I'm reviewing it after watching it on DVD in 2022. Before rewatching it, all I remembered about it was that the Szalinksis' toddler got enlarged into a giant, and that Keri Russell played a babysitter who got trapped in the toddler's overalls pocket.

Well, Wayne Szalinski is now working for some big scientific corporation, to which he had licensed his shrink ray from the first movie. He's currently working on a project to enlarge things instead of shrinking them, though I don't really understand why that's so hard, considering the shrink ray can already be reversed to do exactly that. But somehow, the growth ray isn't working. The director (or co-director) of the project is a scientist named Dr. Charles Hendrickson (John Shea), who wants to get Wayne fired, and also wants to replace the current head of the company, Clifford Sterling (Lloyd Bridges), who supports Wayne. Meanwhile, Wayne and Diane's daughter, Amy, heads off to college, so we barely see her in the movie. But their son, Nick, plays a larger role. He has a crush on a girl named Mandy (Russell), who gets hired as a babysitter for the Szalinskis' youngest child, Adam (whom they had sometime after the first movie). Wayne gets an idea for how to make the growth ray work, and takes Nick and Adam to the lab. Adam accidentally gets exposed to the ray, and later starts growing whenever he's near electricity. He grows several times throughout the film, and heads toward Las Vegas, with Nick and Mandy in his pocket. The Szalinskis want to stop him and shrink him, and they get help from a U.S. Marshal named Brooks. Meanwhile, Hendrickson wants to capture Adam and experiment on him, I guess.

I don't know what else to say about the plot. There's really not that much of a story, and it's not all that funny, for the most part. And I had mixed feelings about the special effects. Sometimes I thought the giant toddler interacting with regular-sized people and things looked fairly realistic, and sometimes pretty unrealistic. And I couldn't get too invested in the whole Nick and Mandy potential relationship. But the movie had is good moments. Especially some scenes where I felt like Rick Moranis (Wayne) was improvising lines based on Adam possibly going off-script. (Though it's also kind of remarkable that the kid was ever on-script.) Anyway, I'm glad to have finally seen the movie again, but it's not something I feel that I'm likely to want to watch in the future.