The kid is obnoxious from start to finish, and the way he fantasizes about his uncle's girlfriend (Mary Steenburgen) is tasteless.

Clifford, starring Martin Short as a precociously nasty 10-year-old, is not a good movie. It's not even good/bad. But Short has a few of those laugh-out-loud moments.

Clifford never quite finds its tone. The course of the plot has an inevitability about it that is about as wearying as it is reassuring... And yet Clifford is intermittently hilarious, mainly thanks to Short's performance.

There are definitely merits to Clifford, but they are honestly few and far between, and the majority of the film is not terrible so much as just blandly ordinary.