Regina Hall is 12 again in the trailer for Little | Little White Lies

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Regi­na Hall is 12 again in the trail­er for Little

09 Jan 2019

Words by Charles Bramesco

Woman smiling at camera, wearing a white top, with a pink "Believe all women" banner visible behind her.
Woman smiling at camera, wearing a white top, with a pink "Believe all women" banner visible behind her.
She stars along­side Issa Rae in the upcom­ing body-change comedy.

With Big, a boy mag­icked him­self into the grown-up body of Tom Han­ks. 17 Again did this in reverse, trans­mo­gri­fy­ing Matthew Per­ry into the swishy-haired form of Zac Efron. 13 Going on 30 flipped the gen­der dynam­ic, rework­ing the Big tem­plate with Jen­nifer Gar­ner in the lead. What these films all share in com­mon, apart from fam­i­ly-friend­ly hijinks, is their eye-sear­ing whiteness.

Pro­vid­ing a course-cor­rec­tion of diver­si­ty is the new body-switch com­e­dy Lit­tle, which got its first trail­er this morn­ing. Regi­na Hall dons her bright­est pow­er suits as an alpha-female exec­u­tive who treats her loy­al assis­tant (Issa Rae) like yesterday’s fishbones.

But after she’s hexed by a Lisa Frank T‑shirt-clad child, Hall shrinks back to her grade-school self, por­trayed by TV up-and-com­er Mar­sai Mar­tin. The pint-size ter­ror must team up with her own assis­tant, their pow­er dynam­ic now upend­ed, to get both of their lives back on track.

Smart mon­ey says they’ll learn a les­son or two about them­selves along the way, that much is par for the course, but there’s a decent amount sep­a­rat­ing this entry from the canon of sim­i­lar films. For one, it pro­vides Rae with a prop­er vehi­cle for the estimable comedic chops she’s already proven on the small screen.

More­over, see­ing a major stu­dio com­e­dy project staffed at the most vis­i­ble lev­els with black women – Tina Gor­don Chism, writer of Drum­line and ATL, took the director’s chair – rep­re­sents anoth­er step in a pos­i­tive direc­tion for Hollywood.

Take a gan­der at the trail­er below, before Lit­tle comes to the­atres on 12 April.

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