What do you get when you mix an action flick with a movie aimed at kids, but with an adult romance thrown in for good measure?  You get Kindergarten Cop (1990), and it is one of the strangest pieces of cinema I have ever seen.  I try to avoid superlatives because there will always be something else to see, and I have already watched and reviewed thousands of titles.  In the course of this viewing adventure, I have experienced the gamut of works.  As always, I try to offer some kind of Catholic angle to even the most bizarre.  This one, though, is so tonally divergent that I am not sure what to do with it.  Nevertheless, I will start at the beginning and see what happens.

If you start at the beginning of Kindergarten Cop (and why would you not?), you might think you are being shown a gritty police drama.  After all, Detective John Kimble (Arnold Schwarzenegger) of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has a beard.  Gritty, right?  Regardless of facial hair, he is following notorious gangster Cullen Crisp (Richard Tyson).  Cullen is walking through a mall on his way to meet an informant who is going to tell him the location of his wife.  Once he has that information, he murders the man and flees the scene.  Detective Kimble arrives too late to save the victim, but his girlfriend, Cindy (Alix Koromzay), who had witnessed the shooting, reveals herself.  She is brought into the precinct, but did not like how she had been handled and refuses to talk.  It takes Detective Kimble firing wildly into a night club in which she takes refuge in order for her to cooperate.  She relents and points Cullen out in a lineup, leading to his arrest.  As he is about to be locked up, he sees his mother and crime boss, Eleanor Crisp (Carroll Baker), and they talk about a matter that needs to be addressed.  I will go ahead and end the cryptic-ness right away and say that they are referring to his wife and son, who are hiding in Astoria, Oregon.  The police are interested in this person because she supposedly stole $3 million from him and she will thus be inclined to testify against Cullen and keep him in prison.  The authorities know the school their son is attending, but do not know what she looks like.  Thus, they send Detective Kimble and his new partner, Detective Phoebe O’Hara (Pamela Reed), to the Pacific Northwest.  Detective O’Hara will be posing as a substitute kindergarten teacher while Detective Kimble will be pursuing the ex-wife.  However, after landing and on the way to Astoria, Detective O’Hara comes down with food poisoning and is unable to be in front of a classroom full of children.  Instead, Detective Kimble volunteers to go, first clearing it with the school principal, Miss Ingrid Schlowski (Linda Hunt).  Miss Schlowski is suspicious of a man of Detective Kimble’s stature, but he bluffs his way through their interview.  He is then brought to the classroom with a strict admonition that he will be watched.  As one might expect, the first day is a disaster, and it starts when he has to ask another teacher, Joyce Palmieri (Penelope Ann Miller), to help with a little girl that needs to use the restroom.  As soon as the little ones are out of his sight, chaos reigns.  The second day is not much better.  It takes a pep talk from Detective O’Hara for him to finally get an idea of how to control the classroom.  Detective Kimble does so by turning his students into soldiers in a boot camp, complete with a whistle.  As he settles into a routine, he begins interrogating the kids to see who might be the child for whom he is looking.  There are a few false candidates that lead him into thinking he is getting close, but none of them turn out to be the right people.  At the same time, he starts to develop feelings for Joyce.  Her son, Dominic Palmieri (Christian and Joseph Cousins), is in his class.  Initially, he has to pass off Detective O’Hara’s presence as his visiting sister from Austria.  Nonetheless, Detective Kimble gets a private invitation to dinner with her at her house.  By this point, it is becoming a little clearer that she is likely Rachel Crisp, so he spends some of the evening searching for clues that could link her to Cullen.  Though he finds nothing, she later reveals that her ex-husband does not live in France like she tells everyone.  Instead, he resides in California and she and Dominic have been hiding from him.  It all but confirms Detective Kimble’s suspicions, but it is also the night that his relationship with Joyce turns romantic.  At the same time, Cindy is found by Cullen and Eleanor and murdered.  With Cindy’s death, Cullen is released.  The warning is sent north that Detectives Kimble and O’Hara need to act because Cullen will likely be headed their way.  Hence, they break the news during a school fair, and Joyce is not happy about being lied to by somebody she had begun to trust.  It takes some convincing by Detective Kimble that he offers her and Dominic the best chance for protection, and they go to school the next day as normal.  Surprise, surprise, guess who shows up, gun in hand?  It is Cullen, of course, and in order to get Dominic, the criminal starts a fire in the school library.  In the confusion, Cullen snatches Dominic, meaning the little boy has to not only deal with the shock of learning the identity of his real father, but witness that same person eventually be shot to death.  Eleanor is arrested, too, for whatever that is worth.  Detective Kimble is wounded in the process, but he returns to the school after he gets out of the hospital to a happy class and an even happier Joyce.

Joyce’s happiness at the end of Kindergarten Cop is displayed to a classroom full of children when she starts making out with Detective Kimble.  Between that and the multiple instances of little ones discussing sexual reproductive organs or talking openly about divorce, I was often puzzled by the proceedings.  It also begins and concludes with a couple of violent sequences that bookend what is supposed to be a wacky premise about a buff cop having to oversee twenty-odd kindergartners.  The oddity of such a cinematic mix is why I did not take many notes during my viewing.  With such a dearth of material, I suppose I could talk more about how inappropriate it is for some of the things we see children doing.  I suppose this material is supposed to be funny because they are innocent, so they do not fully understand the things they are saying.  However, the Bible holds little ones up as examples of how to be Christ-like.  As such, when you see them engaged in activities like correctly identifying the differences between female and male gender specific body parts, or boys looking up girls’ skirts, Faith would say unequivocally that these actions are wrong.  Yet, they are arguably not the worst examples.  The ones who discuss the fact that their parents are divorced is bad, particularly because it needlessly exposes them to weighty issues.  The world is a place that will wound you, and only God can provide any kind of real healing.  It is made even more difficult when they are victims of parental abuse, which also comes up at one point, or having to be party to a shooting.  Further, keep in mind that these are child actors being exposed to material for which they are not prepared.  God says there is a time and place for such things, and they should not be forced into these situations for what is essentially a job.

And it was quite the chore getting through Kindergarten Cop.  On the plus side, I will admit that Schwarzenegger’s comedic timing is decent.  Otherwise, I would recommend avoiding this one unless you want to be confused.