Review of Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules (2011) by Shiira — 16 Apr 2011

So what changed between the sixth and seventh grade? Gupta(Karan Brar) must be wondering. Over the summer, the diminutive, yet outspoken and exceedingly confident Indian kid moved back to the motherland, "the jewel of Southeast Asia", supposedly for good, but now he's back stateside, attending the same middle school as Greg Heffley(Zachary Gordon), only to receive the cold shoulder from his once cherished friend.

Was it something he said? At the roller rink, the last time Gupta saw the old gang before the start of the new semester, he and his nerdy friends, as usual, forming a united front of losers, found themselves on the outside looking in, watching the popular kids having fun, while they kept themselves company, trying desperately to look cool.

(Memo to Greg: Don't come with your parents.) Perhaps the wimpy kid thinks that by ostracizing Gupta, his social circle will move up the ladder of high school society, determining that their association with a foreigner was holding them back from making inroads with the cheerleaders and the jocks.

If popularity means so much to Greg, then the wimpy kid needs to be far more scrupulous and cutthroat than that. Hanging around Rowley(Robert Capron) seems far more disadvantageous to his goal of widespread junior high societal acceptance.

In the original "Diary of a Wimpy Kid", Rowley, who is, to put it kindly, a tad on the big-boned side(Fregley, played by Grayson Russell is worse, the scraggly kid looks like he doesn't wash), rides around the neighborhood on a girl's bike, complete with pink tassels, and shows up to class dressed in traditional Guatemalan peasant clothing, featuring a serape, which when translated into English, means "girl repellent".

In "Rodrick Rules", an adaptation of the fourth title in the popular children's literature series by Jeff Kinney, Rowley is guileless as ever, this time bringing his love of magic tricks into the open, the school hallway, of all places, where he asks Greg to be his assistant for the talent show.

The wimpy kid flat out rejects his friend's offer, which normally would be the prudent choice, but in Kinney's filmic universe, individual expression is lauded, not ridiculed, best exemplified when Rowley gets away with bringing his mother to a formal dance in the first film.

Undeservedly, Greg is part of a well-received act, reluctantly collaborating on the magic presentation with Rowley, who never finds out that the wimpy kid was in actuality, supporting his older brother, not him.

Greg is no Napoleon Dynamite(Jon Heder), who in the Jared Hess indie sensation, goes the whole nine yards to help Pedro win the election by tripping the nerd fantastic, in possibly the best dance sequence since John Travolta took to the disco floor in John Badham's "Saturday Night Fever".

Pedro's ethnicity is never becomes an issue with Napoleon. He's true blue. Greg, on the other hand, in a shockingly nefarious move, coordinates a school-wide prank on Gupta, in which the entire student body conspires to pretend that the olive-skinned seventh grader is invisible.

In the cafeteria, Greg scores a cheap easy laugh at Gupta's expense. It's a gutsy move on the filmmaker's part to present a flawed hero, but the Indian boy's expulsion from his peer group borders on mean-spiritedness.

Because of India's caste system, to Gupta, being thought of as invisible must hurt real bad, because it bears the connotation of being "an untouchable", somebody who hails from the Harijan class, a group who stands outside the system.

In essence, using the public school hierarchy for the purpose of an analogy, Greg casts the Indian from the middle school untouchables: the nerds. And where does that leave him? Alone.