Mark Steven Johnson's major reworking, and hence renaming, of the John Irving novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany, about a seriously small boy (no constricting label on the order of midget or dwarf is ever applied) who believes himself predestined to become a big hero. This he ultimately does, albeit unpersuasively, in a feel-good restaging of the bus accident from The Sweet Hereafter, and only after fate has dealt him a capricious blow of the sort we associate with the author of The World According to Garp. (The naked baby featured in the advertisements serves as a Pavlovian prod to such association.) The total construction is a bit like a hero sandwich: a present-day prologue and epilogue around layers and layers of crude comedy and sticky sentimentality. Jim Carrey puts in a cameo appearance in the bun portions, and provides a moralizing narration in between: "Time is a monster that can't be reasoned with," and so forth. Ian Michael Smith, Joseph Mazzello, Ashley Judd, Oliver Platt, David Strathairn, Jan Hooks. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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