Little Miss Millions (4 Stars)

"Little Miss Millions", also known as "Home For Christmas", is about a 12-year-old girl called Heather Lofton. Her parents divorced when she was very young, and she went to live with her father who remarried, rather than remaining with her mother who would have been a single mother. Her father has recently died and she can't stand her stepmother, so she decides to run away from home (in Los Angeles) to be with her mother in Denver, Colorado.

The father was a multi-millionaire and he's left his money to his daughter, so the stepmother is anxious to get her back, since she has been liberally dipping into her daughter's bank account since his death. Supposedly a parent is allowed to withdraw $5000 from an underage child's account at any time, but if the withdrawals are too frequent it has to be proved that the money is needed to be used for the child's care.

The stepmother hires a private detective called Nick Frost -- that's a good name! -- to find her daughter, offering him a reward of $500,000, but a few hours later she reports to the police that Nick has kidnapped her. This is a mean trick, but I fail to see why she did it. If she didn't want to pay the money, why couldn't she just have told the police she had run away? Maybe she expects the police to take a kidnapping more seriously than a runaway child? I don't know.

The story is about the relationship between Heather and the detective. At first she hates him because he's taking her back to her stepmother, but as the journey continues she realises he has her best interests at heart and begins to regard the seemingly heartless detective as a father figure. Nick dodges the cops, who are hilariously incompetent, in order to earn his money, but he begins to wonder if he is taking Heather back to the right place.

What's the reason for the film's alternative title? Heather runs away on December 20th.

The film is well written and competently acted, as is to be expected of all of Jim Wynorski's films. I don't know what the target audience is supposed to be. It doesn't seem suitable as a family film. Most parents would want to tell their daughters to go to the police rather than trust an older man, but "Little Miss Millions" gives the opposite advice. Obviously it's not a film intended to be watched by adults, but I'm not just any adult. I enjoy it as an alternative to Marvel blockbusters.