Guilty pleasure in an implausible movie

Rating: 6/10 (22 January 2004)

This movie stretches credibility to its limits. Sure, it's a comedy, so it can get away with some stuff. A kid is more competent than everyone else in an upper-middle-class family and he gets stuck at home because the family doesn't count its kids right. Two dimwitted crooks set out to burglarize a house believing that the family is away for the holiday; the kid is there, and he is a menace.
The kid has an engineering talent freakishly developed for a ten-year-old kid and the sadistic cleverness that that he exposes in creating Rube Goldberg-like devices for tormenting a pair of burglars who fail to get the message that there really is someone there. I know that the garden variety of crooks are usually on the low side on intellectual development, but one time would be enough -- right? How many times do those crooks have to take falls, burns, and sharp objects into them before they learn?
It's somewhat fun -- if you can pass up the stupidity, the gaps in the plot, and the mean-spiritedness beneath a saccharine veneer.