Beka P., here….
Into the Who Knows is billed as a kid’s adventure, all-age crowd pleaser. I had high hopes for this film, but I just can’t say that I’m on board with that description. I am not sure what age this film would appeal to, but it doesn’t strike me a young kid’s film and I wasn’t that into it as an adult. And since it’s a movie about a young boy and his imaginary fox best friend, I am going to go ahead and say that it’s not going to appeal to teens. Perhaps there is an audience out there that would love this film, but I think it’s going to be a small demographic. That being said, it’s also not an adventure movie.
Into the Who Knows stars Bryce Gheisar as the young actor who plays Thomas. You may recognize him from A Dog’s Purpose, unless you boycotted that, and then you recognize him from only the commercials. He’s the best part of the film as he is charming, cute, funny and can out act the other actors, both young and old alike. Thomas’s best friend is Felix, his stuffed fox. He does everything with Felix, but his favorite thing to do is have adventures. He pretends to be an astronaut, or fly, etc. and Felix is his sidekick. In the film, Felix is played by Delaney Wingrove, a teenage girl wearing a worn out fox costume. Thomas’s parents are interested in him having human friends, but it’s not going smoothly. That’s when they decide to send him to summer camp and impose a no Felix rule.
Thomas’s parents, played by Lee Eddy and Macon Blair do a fair job of acting like anxious parents. I did enjoy the scene where they drop Thomas off at camp. There is some humor throughout the film, but overall it seems kind of drawn out, slow, and still. Thomas ends up fleeing camp with Felix by heading across the lake, and this is where the film loses me. Where the adventure is supposed to begin, I completely dropped out. Perhaps I am too old or unwilling to suspend disbelief but nothing made sense about the across the lake adventure. Thomas is gone for days without the camp locating him, which seems insane to me. Also, he has an iPhone that he uses to film monsters overnight and it’s still got juice three days later. Unfortunately these are things I was concentrating on as we all know your iPhone battery lasts approximately 3 hours and even less if you video. Also, can we acknowledge that if he had that phone they should have just located him using find my iPhone? But I digress.
This adventure is a metaphor for something much bigger that leads to an obvious breakthrough for Thomas, but at a painful cost to the viewer. It’s slow, it’s dark, and it’s kind of weird. In the end, things work out and Thomas’s parents leave him at the camp that lost him for three days (again, nope nope nope), but it kind of gives you a warm fuzzy if you can suspend literally all disbelief and say who knows… this could happen.
-Beka Perlstein