Metacritic reviews

Adults can enjoy the way these youngsters spout grown-up chatter and all ages can delight in the old-fashioned slapstick. I won't claim this film's great, but it is fun, and remarkably innocent and playful.

The Little Rascals is such an emphatically well-shaped, well-crafted picture that you wish you could have enjoyed it more than you did.

Those who grew up watching The Little Rascals may well be intrigued by the idea of introducing their kids to this full-color, bigscreen version. Still, the challenge of stretching those mildly diverting shorts to feature length remains formidable, and one has to wonder whether an audience exists beyond nostalgic parents and their young children.

This attempt to reproduce the old series still feels stilted -- a see-through marketing impulse more than a creative venture.

Both director and co-writer of Rascals redux, Spheeris coaxes artless performances from the picture's engaging ensemble of half-pint players.

The main trouble is that The Little Rascals is caught in a time warp, lost between the ingenuous ragamuffins of the early talkies and the more willfully streetwise children of today. So even working the title into the screenplay becomes a strain.

An unsatisfactory feature treatment of beloved characters from the world of television.

Director Spheeris (Wayne's World) seems to have taken her obsession with youth culture beyond the limit, including a scene of dancing teenies in pink leotards that would make John Waters blush.

The Little Rascals is a nice-looking movie-shot in a nostalgic childhood haze by Richard Bowen-but watching it is almost numbing. It's the kind of empty gaudy show the misfit characters in Spheeris' good comedies might waste their time with.

What sounded like a bad idea before it started shooting, proves such an atrocity that it makes her last effort, The Beverly Hillbillies, look almost Oscar-worthy.