LIKE Bedazzled, Disney's The Kid addresses the possibility of changing yourself into someone else: and apparently it's never too late to start turning into a middle-American with a soppy dog and kids and a thing about pilots.

In this implausible, nonsensical Disney fantasy, successful and smug image consultant Russ Duritz (Bruce Willis) undergoes corrective character surgery at the hands of his younger self, eight-year-old Rusty Duritz (Spencer Breslin).

Russ is on the cusp of 40, a workaholic bachelor with the flash pad and flashier car. This particular image consultant appears to have neglected his own image, or maybe he is just happy with being cynical, self-centred, irascible and insufferable.

Don't analyse why or how too deeply, but along comes Rusty, the boy he consigned to history when he moved to the big city.

Rusty is podgy, awkward, a victim of school bullying: a past wound Russ has removed with the aid of mental plastic surgery.

Now he is back to help Russ find himself, and young Rusty doesn't like how he's turned out at all (even if Russ does).

In the manner of Field Of Dreams, magic should be at play in Jon Turtletaub's comic drama but it remains out of reach.

That said, Willis has once again managed to defy W C Fields' advice never to work with children. There may not be the mystery - and there certainly isn't the drama and thrills - of The Sixth Sense but Willis sporadically spars amusingly with Breslin, his mini-me. Unfortunately, poor Emily Mortimer in Audrey Hepburn chic is all but squeezed out as Russ's assistant and love interest.

Disney's The Kid ends up a convoluted, disgruntled kids' movie with a puritanical anti-yuppie message for adults: no wonder so many Americans reach out for the psychiatrist's couch.