The film follows a 40-year-old image consultant (Bruce Willis) who is mysteriously confronted by an eight-year-old version of himself (Spencer Breslin); Emily Mortimer, Lily Tomlin, Chi McBride, and Jean Smart also star.

Days from turning 40, Russ Duritz is a successful but abrasive image consultant in Los Angeles and has a strained relationship with his father.

Thinking he is hallucinating, he visits a psychiatrist, but finds the same boy on his couch eating popcorn and watching cartoons when he returns home.

They celebrate their birthday, but realize their efforts to change the outcome of the day have failed, as their father's outburst left Rusty emotionally scarred in both cases.

When a dog named Chester greets Rusty, they find that his owner is an older version of them who owns planes and has a family with Amy.

It's a sweet film, unexpectedly involving, and shows again that Willis, so easily identified with action movies, is gifted in the areas of comedy and pathos: This is a cornball plot, and he lends it credibility just by being in it.

"[10] Film critic A. O. Scott, writing for The New York Times, observed: "Mr. Willis stands by while a child swipes a movie out of his open palm...Spencer Breslin, Russ is tubby, cute-but-annoying almost-8-year-old self.

The San Francisco Examiner's Welsey Morris called the film a "dishonest baby boomer melodrama of inner-selfness and increased sensitivity for yuppie dads", noting that its "wields its Middle America values and moralistic flogging of idiosyncratic lifestyle choices like a flipped bird", though he commented Breslin is "more charming than the film deserves".

[12] Todd McCarthy of Variety wrote "director Jon Turteltaub's insistence upon hammering every point home with giant closeups and relentless musical underlining makes this insufferably cloying and sickly sweet for anyone with the least intolerance to 'find the inner child' saccharinity".