CONTAINS SILLINESS AND SPOILERS
Well, it looked kind of amusing on the shelf, and what's the worst that can happen? There's nothing wrong with harmless teen frippery and silly PG-rated action movies for the younger crowd, and the kid-friendly genre movies of a generation past weren't any kind of lasting masterpiece either. So long as it's light, fun and rattles along reasonably efficiently and doesn't take too long, its failure to match up to Vertigo or Citizen Kane is hardly a strike against it.
What it doesn't say on the DVD box except in the credits block is that Mission Without Permission is an early lead appearance for Kristen Stewart some four years before the outbreak of Twilight. Little Miss Grumpyknickers stars as an obsessive climber who gets together with two friends to rob a hi-tech bank so she can pay for her dad's life-saving but experimental (and expensive) medical treatment. Her mother (Jennifer Beals) just happens to have been hired by the bank to install a foolproof and impregnable security system which cannot possibly be circumvented - unless you're very good at climbing and have a computer hacker accomplice who can also face down the attack dogs, and another who can customise a set of go-karts to slip under the security shutters...
Surprisingly it's directed by Bart Freundlich, who started out with the dreary family drama The Myth Of Fingerprints which I can still remember drifting sleepwards halfway through. Mission Without Permission is twaddle of course, but it's inoffensive twaddle, nobody gets hurt, and it's over and done in 90 minutes or so. As a disposable distraction it's adequate enough: the bank manager is an easy boo-hiss villain, Stewart is only on half-sulk rather than the Full-On Bella Mope, and the silliness of the caper makes it a generally palatable enterprise. If I'd paid more than 25p I'd probably feel I hadn't got my money's worth, but then I'm not really the target audience. Retitled from Catch That Kid, for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
**
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