Big Fat Liar (PG)
IMDb; Rotten Tomatoes; TV Tropes; Universal; Wikipedia
streaming sites: Amazon; Google Play; iTunes; Movies Anywhere; Vudu; YouTube

This came out in 2002, and I'm sure I saw it on like DVD or whatever, sometime in the early Aughts. I have this vague sense that I bought the DVD for my sister, though now I can't imagine why I would have done that, so it's possible I'm wrong. Anyway, I bought it again at a thrift shop in 2022 (holy fuck is this really 20 years later?) just because I wanted to write a review, and I think the first time I watched it must have been before I started writing reviews. I was pretty close to putting my review in the "family" section, but ultimately I decided to go with "comedy", because I feel like it's a good movie for people of any age. (Which is also true of most of the movies I put in "family", but... whatever, I don't know.) The title works on at least four levels: Jason is a big fat liar, Marty is a big fat liar, the story/movie within the movie is called "Big Fat Liar", and anyone who says this isn't a good movie is a big fat liar. But seriously... twenty years??? That's insane.

So, there's this 14-year-old kid named Jason Shepherd (Frankie Muniz, from Malcolm in the Middle) who always lies. One day when he hasn't done a paper for English class that counts for a third of his grade, he gets caught in a lie, and his teacher, Ms. Caldwell (Sandra Oh), gives him one chance to write the paper within three hours. And he actually does it. He writes a story called "Big Fat Liar". Then he has to get back to school to turn in the paper, but his skateboard had been stolen earlier by some bullies, so he has to ride his sister's old bike, and ends up crashing into a limo. He gets a ride from the guy in the limo, a Hollywood producer named Marty Wolf (Paul Giamatti). Unfortunately, Jason accidentally leaves his story in the car, and when he tries to tell Ms. Caldwell and his parents about it, they don't believe him. So he has to go to summer school.

One day, Jason and his best friend, Kaylee (Amanda Bynes), go to a movie and see a preview for another movie that would be coming out the next summer, called "Big Fat Liar". Jason realizes Wolf stole his story and turned it into a movie, but his parents still don't believe him. So that weekend, Jason and Kaylee go to Hollywood to try to get Wolf to admit to stealing the story. Jason doesn't even want credit for it, he just wants Wolf to tell his father about it, to regain his trust. But Wolf refuses, so Jason and Kaylee set out to ruin his life with a series of pranks, which I don't want to detail. But in the process, we see that Wolf is terrible not just to Jason, but to everyone around him, all the time. Jason and Kaylee get some help from a limo driver named Frank (Donald Faison), whom Wolf had fired some time ago, as well as trying to screw up his potential acting career. Meanwhile, Wolf tries to get the new president of Universal Pictures, Marcus Duncan (Russell Hornsby), to approve a new budget for his movie, before it can start production.

Toward the end of the movie, Jason and Kaylee get help from a bunch of other people Wolf had treated like dirt, including his assistant, Monty (Amanda Detmer); a director named Dusty (John Cho) toward whom Wolf had made a racist comment at one point; a PR person named Jocelyn (Amy Hill) toward whom he had made a comment about her weight; a stunt coordinator named Vince (Lee Majors) toward whom Wolf had made comments about his age; Jaleel White (as himself), who doesn't like Wolf calling him Urkel; and various other people. They also get Jason's parents to come to Hollywood. Of course they finally trick Wolf into admitting the truth, and... he really would have been much better off just making a phone call before all this went down.

Anyway, it's not a great movie, it's all rather ridiculous, but I definitely found it fun and somewhat amusing. I suspect I liked it better the second time I saw it than I did the first time, many years earlier. And I liked the whole cast, pretty much. Oh, and of course the story is vaguely based on "The Boy Who Cried Wolf", which is obvious from both Marty's last name, "Wolf", and Jason's last name, "Shepherd". But there's definitely a happier ending to this story than that fable. Also, Jason learns a lesson about telling the truth. And I liked Bynes's clips as a guide in the DVD menu. And I don't know what else to tell you.