It’s generally undisputed that Max Keeble’s Big Move is a kids’ movie. It’s got all the hallmarks: crotch kicks, a mischievous chimpanzee, a sadistic middle school principal, the fat Josh Peck, and a relatable ostrich-riding preteen hero with a master plan to save the day. By most standards, it’s pure, unapologetic Disney schlock.
Something to consider, though: Max Keeble’s Big Move was released on October 5, 2001—a little less than a month after the historic terrorist attacks that left Americans feeling more scared and powerless than they had in a long time. And in retrospect, I think this was the perfect kids’ movie to kick off the war on terror: the age of American fear, uncertainty, hopelessness, and decline. It introduced kids to the harsh realities of the world: life’s inherent injustice, violence, absurdity, and the futility of moralistic crusading. It depicts a world governed by tyranny and torment, surveillance and conspiracy.
And sure — you could interpret this movie as sappy. As a story about accepting responsibility for your actions, and how one person can make a difference.
But that’s simply not the message at the core of Max Keeble’s Big Move. Ultimately, whether intentionally or not, this is a story about disillusionment and defeat, and hopefully finding some freedom in spite of those things.
We’re introduced to 11 year-old Max, who lives, by most standards, a pretty cushy suburban white kid existence. He lives in a comfortably furnished house in a cozy town, has two parents who love him, loyal friends, even a paper route. But somehow, Max isn’t satisfied with all this. He wants more—the American preteen dream, in a way. He’s possessed by heroic fantasy—in the opening sequence, he squares off against his arch-enemy, the Evil Ice Cream Man. Max defeats the bad guy with a little bit of cheesy kung fu, victoriously delivers his papers on time, and nearly gets the ninth grade girl he pines for—until she’s humiliated with a shotgun blast of ice cream to the face, abruptly waking Max and shattering his fantasy.
See, even in Keeble’s dreams, he can’t win. Something always gets in the way—usually a bully. Already, we see the absurd conflict between the life Max wants, and the crushing weight of reality. He’s not cool. He’s nobody’s hero. In fact, he’s pretty much just nobody. One of the most generic kids movie protagonists ever conceived.
But Max has a plan to turn it all around: He’s got a new look, and a new fat attitude:
Fattitude.
Awww, yeah. This is gonna be Keeble’s year. He knows it. He’s got his hairclipped band geek not-girlfriend and chunky Peck in a bathrobe at his side, and nothing can stop them.
…Except any of, like, ten bullies who sadistically impose their version of neo-fascist order on the middle school.
First of all, you’ve got Principal Jindraike, who’s so obsessed with building a football stadium and becoming superintendent that he’s cut funding to virtually every important school resource. The place is barely an educational institution anymore—just a haven of fear and misery. “This is not a happy place.”
And nobody reinforces that, thrives on that, like Troy McGinty, your classic black pants with an accompanying chain, leather jacket-clad super-bully, who’s vowed to torment a different kid every day. He’s a show-off and a sadist—he’ll scrawl his daily victims’ names on his t-shirt in black marker, lock them in trophy display cases, even dunk them in a dumpster. No one does anything about this. Not the teachers, not the principal, not even the other tormented kids. They all exist only in terror that they might be next. McGinty rules the school.
Then there’s Dobbs, the maniacal stockbroker bully. He’s a disgraced former self-made bajillionaire, and his obsession with redemption makes sense—but how is a 10 year old supposed to have made a fortune in the market in the first place? Nobody seems to care. Teachers love him.
So there you have it. In addition to a couple of other authority figures, such as a teacher who assigns essays as punishment for tardiness, we’ve got a picture of Max’s new life: Principal Jindraike, Troy McGinty, Dobbs, the Evil Ice Cream Man. It’s easy to hate these characters, until we realize that they’ve each got their own bullshit to deal with.
Jindraike is a very specific kind of middle-age unsatisfied. He wants more than anything to be superintendent. He wants it so badly that he’ll sabotage the stability of his school to build a football stadium, just hoping it’ll win him the current boss’s favor. And he sees his own school as a hindrance on that path. Everyone is his enemy, from the kids to his secretary to the band teacher and the janitor. But Jindraike’s a comic figure—his bloated self-image is obviously, pathetically put-upon. It’s a charade. We see this in his daily televised addresses to the school, set in front of a fake backdrop image of Washington, D.C. It’s all pretty Orwellian until he forgets to turn the camera off, or Keeble sabotages the background. The man’s a joke. On some level, he probably knows this.
Take a closer look at Dobbs—he’s consumed by a quest for possession, image, and status. It’s way more sinister than the way he freaks out when his personal tech gets stolen. He takes other kids’ lunch money under the flimsy guise of investing it for them, supposedly to rebuild a massive fortune piece by piece. But that’s the thing—if he’s really a financial wunderkind, he must know that stealing lunch money can only get him so far. Which means it’s not actually about making the money back. It’s about self-image. It’s about how Dobbs wants, needs to see himself.
Even McGinty is traumatized. Granted, it’s by a childhood fear of McGoogles, a guy in a big Scottish frog costume. But the fear is real enough. Maybe he’s trying to leave everyone else as scared as he is. He wants to brutalize the other kids’ innocence, impose on them the same terror that he himself feels. Destroy their feeling of safety just like his was destroyed: by a singing kids tv show character.
These bullies share at least one important trait: they all crave power. They’re all desperate for agency. Each of them suffers from the same ideological disease as Max—the inability to reconcile their world’s perceived cruelty with what they think they deserve from life—the way things ought to be. It’s classic absurdity.
Ultimately, Max does defeat these bullies—sort of. But he’s only able to do that by accepting and embracing absurd reality—being-in-itself—and realizing what some would call his radical freedom. It’s sort of chosen for him, and whether or not he understands what he’s doing on an existential level is up for debate. But he does eventually act.
It takes a while to get to this turning point in the movie. We have to slog through a whole first act of nothing but torture. But when his parents spring the fact that he’s moving on him, Max realizes that he can do whatever he wants—if he’s moving to Chicago at the end of the week, there are no consequences for his actions. But still, he decides he’s gonna use this paradigm shift to try and impose the futile order that he wants the universe to have. The one he dreams about. He’s gonna take back his school, save the community, and become a legend.
To an extent, Max succeeds. He expertly pits the bullies against each other, capitalizing on their own lust for power to thwart their efforts. He’s shown to be resourceful, conniving, even brilliant. At the end, we even get a great scene of the entire student body charging out to the parking lot, challenging McGinty and Dobbs as a group, and finally proclaiming “We’re Not Gonna Take It” as the marching band plays that exact Twisted Sister song. The tyrants get thrown into a dumpster. Poetic justice at its most obvious. Max even faces down Jindraike’s bulldozer—a destructive apparatus the principal has appropriately, perhaps even symbolically, nicknamed “the Keeble.” Max saves the animal shelter with a swift strike by a pheromone-crazed animal army. And he learns that his real friends were there for him all along. He doesn’t need to be cool—just genuine. It’s all pretty heartwarming.
But the shit’s not over by the time the end credits roll. In fact, we’re right back where we started, with two eternal nemeses set to do battle again. As Max prepares for another day, another paper route, guess who speeds up behind him, screaming, “I’ll get you, paperboy”?
The fuckin’ ice cream man.
So it turns out Max is wrong—even the movie’s most ridiculous antagonist is far from “cooked.” And when you think about it, what’s to keep McGinty and Dobbs from enacting their own form of vengeance? Let’s look at the rules of this universe: If even the puny Max Keeble can recover from getting tossed in a dumpster, can’t the bullies? Nobody really disarmed them. Arguably, they’ll just be angrier than ever. Max’s only hope is that the school will rally behind him again when their resident tyrants return—but as we’ve seen, the middle school is a sort of empathy wasteland. These kids have given no indication that they’ll continue to look out for each other in the long run. They’ve been downright sadistic before. Like when Josh Peck gets locked in that trophy display case and hurls, and everyone laughs at him. Even the teachers are powerless to enact order.
And come to think of it, who owns the animal shelter? At the end of the movie, it’s unclear. Is it the middle school, or is it still Jindraike? Could he still level the shelter out of spite if nothing else? I’m not clear on the rules here, but I don’t know if the fascist principal gets arrested—just fired.
For Max, it’s like pushing the boulder up the hill. Existence is eternal work and conflict, even for an eleven year-old. He’ll never be Lil Romeo, whose scattered guest appearances in the movie seem to represent the life Max wants, but can’t have. Cool, carefree, beloved by all. But he’s not Lil Romeo. Nobody is. And how about the movie’s final absurd insult? Max isn’t moving. He’s gonna stay right where he is.
So what have we learned, if anything? What have we taught our kids? That there’s nothing you can do? Your best efforts at imposing order, no matter how valiant or well-executed, will only work for so long?
Maybe. Probably. But there’s hope too, even in defeat.
Take a look at one of the movie’s more triumphant moments: The food fight scene, where Max scares the superintendent and thoroughly thwarts Jindraike’s ambitions. This is Big Move at its peak absurdity: The tuba spewing mustard, the teacher falling in the garbage can, the football star’s massive poster splattered with schmutz. The journalism kid’s camera gets ruined. There’s a rockin’ soundtrack. Jindraike gets his face smushed into a pile of mashed potatoes by a dancing chimpanzee named Tad. And the kids never seem more blissful than they do in this moment. Embracing the chaos. Participating in it. Causing it. Idols are killed. Anarchy reigns.
If there’s a positive message to be found in Max Keeble’s Big Move, it’s an absurd one: That there’s absolutely nothing significant or permanent that you can do. External forces largely beyond your control will shape the conflicts you’ll face through your entire life. But instead of enduring it all bravely, there’s more power in contributing when the opportunity arises. Not only throwing yourself into the insanity, but introducing it. Like the bullies do. Like Max learns to do.
To say the least, the comedy that late millennials embrace is dark — even nihilistic. Look at cartoons like Bojack Horseman, Rick and Morty, or (odds are) anything else you’ve been streaming. There’s an argument to be made that Max Keeble’s Big Move is (and for a lot of people actually was) a gateway to that kind of comedy. And maybe that’s a stretch—it’s a Disney movie, after all. But whether intentionally or not, Big Move presents a world where heroism is futile and order is an illusion propagated by fear. In other words, life is one big food fight. You can cower under the table, afraid to get your shirt dirty, or you can dance on the principal’s head. And in the real United States of America, where the government looks more corrupt and laughable by the day, where institutional violence is all-consuming, and there seems to be no hope—that message resonates. We have to laugh. We have to embrace it. We have to make big moves.
Roderick Snock is a cartoonist & writer. Known to lurk most places @roddiesnock and at snottyrock.com