"Jack the Bear" is a noble effort to give young audiences material that is meatier than most movies offer them, though it eventually becomes a bit too dark. And it's certainly too much for the very young. (In this case the PG-13 is about right - if your kids are not yet teenagers, "Jack the Bear" is probably not for them.)
Danny DeVito gives an excellent, complex performance as single father John Leary, who has just moved with his two young sonsfrom New York to suburban Oakland, Calif., in the early 1970s.
The film is told from the viewpoint of the oldest boy, Jack (Robert J. Steinmiller Jr.), whose own adolescence is complicated by his having to watch his father's downward spiral.
It seems that Dad, a local television personality who hosts one of those horror movie shows that were popular before VCRs usurped the fad, is having trouble dealing with the death of his wife (Andrea Marcovicci), for which he feels responsible. And alcohol is fast becoming a constant companion. Meanwhile, he dresses up in monstrous attire, uses fake gore to gross out his young, appreciative TV audience and generally has a ghoulish good time on the air.
When he comes home, John is a loving father but too wrapped up in his own self-pity to set things right with his kids. If that's not enough, he must also endure his paranoid in-laws, his boss who is under pressure from the sponsors about John's dark sense of humor, and there is a neo-Nazi living across the street who smells like trouble.
All of this culminates with a scary kidnapping subplot, which unfortunately sinks into routine slasher-film trappings.
DeVito is a fine anchor for all of this and young Steinmiller is very good in what is essentially the lead role. But the film's episodic nature tends to undermine its impetus and the final quarter seems tacked-on, almost like it belongs in some other movie. In short, it suffers from trying to do too much.