The 2003 Stinker Flying Ryan is the A Talking Cat!?! of Shitty Movies About Flying Children
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There’s something inherently fascinating about terrible low-budget movies for children. By definition a cheap family movie cannot use the family-unfriendly elements that define exploitation movies.
These unfortunate, over-matched cheapies can’t feature gratuitous sex, graphic violence, needless profanity or any of the other things that make b-movies watchable. So they chase wildly after novelty and sometimes end up some place hilariously misguided.
That is true of the all-time classic of the so-bad-it’s-good variety, A Talking Cat!?!, a movie that I am proud to say I played a major role in making a modern cult classic. It’s also true of 2003’s Flying Ryan.
Ryan, shown not flying.
A Talking Cat!?! and Flying Ryan are incapable of convincingly showing a character walking from one room to another. Yet that somehow does not stop them from attempting fantasy with some of the crummiest special effects in film history.
These effects are anything but special. The tagline to the original Superman movie famously promised, “You’ll believe a man can fly.” An accurate tag-line for Flying Ryan could riff on that legendary hype by more accurately insisting, “You DEFINITELY will NOT believe a boy can fly.”
Flying Ryan has a lot in common with A Talking Cat!?!, starting with titles that promise more than they can deliver. Because they clearly cost lost than no money, A Talking Cat!?! and Flying Ryan dole out their special effects stingily. It's sort of like how Steven Spielberg wasn’t crazy about the mechanical shark used in Jaws so he used it sparingly and effectively if the production didn’t have a faulty professional shark but rather a child’s inflatable shark toy that they tried to pass off as the real thing.
Get a load of this nerd. Go read a book, Einstein!
Andy Weiss stars as the title character, a red-headed moppet who moves with his broke nurse mom to go live with their eccentric Aunt Rita in the country. Ryan has the usual set of problems. His father died when he was three. He doesn’t have money for clothes or a new soccer ball. And he almost instantly becomes the primary target for the school bully by virtue of being new, living with a woman reputed to be some manner of witch and having insufficiently new athletic gear.
Dirk Cooper (Damon Schoeffler), the town bully, is similarly straight out of central casting. He’s got the blond, spiky hair style favored by schoolyard brutes everywhere. Attractive older girls loiter apathetically in his presence. He has henchmen who live to do his evil bidding.
He’s coded as cool and hip, which means that his presence is inevitably accompanied by frenetic guitar solos. I watch movies with the captions on and was amused that every time a guitar solo happened the captions very generously described it as “edgy rock music.”
Dirk and his sinister cohorts do wicked skateboard tricks and the irritating little shit comes from an entire family of wealthy bullies, although in Flying Ryan that is inexplicably conveyed by having Dirk’s dad fish constantly and throw away his skateboard when it becomes narratively essential.
Dirk at least behaves like he’s going to give the new kid a chance but when he learns that he lives with a weird old woman and sees that the soccer ball he’s toting is worn and used he flies into a blind rage.
When Ryan innocently volunteers, “Hey, want to kick around a soccer ball?” the mean rich kid sneers, “You call this a soccer ball? I’d rather kick around YOU.”
That is not a funny line but Dirk’s dead-eyed sidekicks laugh all the same. Dirk gives Ryan the nickname “Carrot Head” on account of his read hair. It sticks. The bully and his minions deluge Ryan with insults until they chase him into a nearby lake.
Thankfully Ryan has a steadfast chum in Nicki (Geneve Rupert). She’s the kind of model-beautiful girl who would be the impossibly perfect object of desire in most movies but here is a sidekick whose defining characteristic is that she knows a lot of random facts about national capitals and whatnot.
She’s like Jonathan Lipniki in Jerry Maguire if he had no talent and delivered all his lines in an affectless monotone. I believe that it is cruel to make children act. That is doubly true if the movie in question is Flying Ryan. So I will not comment on the children's performances any further.
Aunt Rita is supposed to be a lovable eccentric. When her niece through marriage says that she’s excited about helping assist a doctor performing a surgery, Aunt Rita sneers, “I'm glad somebody around here likes doctors! If you ask me, if you go to a hospital, you don’t get any better! You just come out worse!” Later, she reiterates her hatred for the medical profession when she sneers that the mere sight of those “needle poking doctors” makes her sick.
In a pre-COVID, pre-Trump era, which is to say when the film was made, Aunt Rita’s oft-stated hatred of doctors and medicine might come off as a harmless eccentricity. In a post-COVID world, however, they take on a more ominous quality.
Let’s just say that Aunt Rita would post anti-vaccine, anti-mask and anti-Dr. Fauci memes and would probably be at the January 6th insurrection. Aunt Rita’s angry posts about the evils of the medical establishment would end only when she died from COVID.
In what the film confusingly seems to see as another lovable quirk Aunt Rita also takes things from people’s garbage cans. That’s where she finds the ratty, hole-riddled Heelys that allow Ryan to fly.
Heelys, incidentally, is a brand of shoes with removable wheels on the soles. It’s never clear why Ryan can fly with his Heelys. His great grandfather was an aviator and also mentally ill and also a ghost maybe? I don’t want to be overly critical but the logic and storytelling in this shitty movie about a flying child do not hold up to rigorous scrutiny. Or any scrutiny at all.
Rumor has it he made all his money as a Mr. Bean impersonator!
In a hilariously inept attempt to make it seem like Ryan is soaring through the clouds during the “flying” scenes he’s shot from a low angle. There are helicopter shots that are supposed to represent what Ryan is seeing while soaring through the air like some manner of majestic bird. During one shot he clearly seems to be walking past a large photograph of the sky.
Flying barely figures in the plot until the very end, when Dirk steals the family dog and sells it to his cousin to use as a guard dog.
Ryan flies to the rescue and, after saving the dog, brings it to a hospital where it magically revives Aunt Rita, who had fallen sick and was stuck in her least favorite place in the world.
If I had to describe Flying Ryan in a one word it would be “fucking stupid.” It’s not A Talking Cat!?! but it is the A Talking Cat?!? of movies where a kid can fly for some reason.
You probably should not see it unless you are professionally obligated to do so, as I am, but if you give it a gander I suspect you’ll enjoy some hearty chuckles at its expense.
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