Imagine That (D+)

Lordy, lordy, all that I have left from this sugar-coated, pleasant-enough mix of human interest and moralizing broad farce is Yara Shahidi's ear-splitting scream that simultaneously could shatter glass and sound like fingernails scraping on a blackboard. The rest - ?

Eddie Murphy's Evan is in competition with American Indian colleague Whitefeather (Thomas Haden Church) for a key position in a top-notch high finance corporation. (If you buy the way this corporation handles its business, I've got a bridge I'd like to sell to you.) Evan is abetted by the serendipitous discovery that his daughter Olivia (Ms. Shahidi) has a security blanket under which she communicates with two imaginary friends to arrive at amazing predictions for the stock market. Complications arise when Evan in desperation finds/loses/finds/loses/finds the blanket, ad nauseam, until he discovers the real facts behind his business talent and - well, you'll never guess how things turn out at the end of this comedy aimed arrow-straight by Nickelodeon Movies at the tykes in the audience.

Tykes also would appreciate the switch in character (Murphy exchanging his Mad Ave threads for hoodie & dark clothes, breaking into one place after another to retrieve the coveted bankey, doing his well-known motor-mouth routine, then as abruptly returning to his business-like demeanor.)
And they would appreciate the simple, oft-told storyline with two-dimensional characters, easy to follow. Writers Ed Solomon & Chris Matheson, along with director Karey Kirkpatrick, aim low while keeping to a well-trod highway; kids will sit through the painful 110-minutes of unoriginal nonsense, but sadly none were present when I saw the flick).

For the rest of us - and most of the audience, which for some odd reason was middle to old-aged - it left nothing but that shattering scream as painful reminder of a flick to avoid at any cost.