It’s easy to gaze into the past and see things that you used to love as a child and to cherish them into adulthood because of your previous association and affection for them, but sometimes looking backwards in time through rose colored glasses doesn’t work. Maybe there are just some pieces of consumable media that, for whatever reason, you loved as a kid, but you grow up and realize that they’re absolute trash. Disney’s Blank Check is a perfect example of this duality of taste.
Blank Check, at its most stripped-down definition, is a film about a 12-year-old boy named Preston is given a blank check after his bike is destroyed. After doing the good, honest thing and forging the check to read $1,000,000, Preston has a ball spending the money until the gangsters he ripped off come looking for him.
However, what seems like a somewhat original premise is executed in the most paint-by-numbers, obscenely trite way onscreen.
The characters make absolutely no sense and their motivations are so muddled. Preston’s dad, for instance, is incredibly hard on the boy for not being an entrepreneur at 12 years old. His two older, meathead brothers have started their own business, but they don’t even know how to use a computer. Preston’s father lays on plenty of guilt for his lack of business savvy because, y’know, 12 year olds should be trading on Wall Street and shit.
