Swindle

Comical accidents and pratfalls yield some bumps and bruises, but they're always meant to be funny for the audience. An elevator tosses around its rider, a man sends a woman dressed as a blind nun down a steep road in a wheelchair, an extendable arm gives a victim a black eye, a deep-tissue massage gets rougher than expected, teens slap each other during a staged argument, etc.

Some teens allude to having feelings for peers, and there's some mild flirting. On a number of occasions boys judge girls' appearances, calling some "hot" and ranking them on a scale of physical attraction. In one scene, a man is shown in a bikini swimsuit; in another, it's implied that a girl accidentally catches sight of a boy in the nude (a scream is heard but nothing is shown).

One instance of "shut up."

Parents need to know that Swindle is a fun heist story about a group of teens who take matters into their own hands when a scheming con man gets the better of them. From a parent's standpoint, there are some potential problems with how the story downplays acts like breaking into a store, destroying property, and hacking a company's financial system. That said, the fact that the kids' nemesis is a conniving swindler makes it easy to root against him and for the clever teens. For kids, though, the story is an off-the-wall adventure of epic proportions, marked by wacky predicaments, absurd costumes, and skin-of-their-teeth close calls. Teens' dialogue often draws attention to certain characters' physical attributes (some girls are called "hot," while others are dismissed as "geeks"), but a minor plot point challenges these predictable stereotypes in a positive way. There's a lot of chaos that causes accidents and leads to some injuries, but viewers will see it in the comical light that's intended. The bottom line? If your tweens don't mistake the characters' law-breaking as plausible problem solving for the real world, then there's not much to sweat in this absurd comedy.

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