The Most Annoying Kids in Steven Spielberg Movies

Jaws

Kid: Sean Brody (Jay Mello)
Your dad just watched a shark devour a kid like he was the last Hot Pocket at Kirstie Alley’s house and he just got publicly slapped by the kid’s grieving mother and what do you do, Sean? Playfully imitate him at the dinner table in a saccharine display of childish obliviousness. Hey, movie, can you quickly cut back to whatever Quint is doing?

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Kid: Barry Guiler (Cary Guffey)
If a guy in your neighborhood recently claims to have been abducted by a UFO and, a little while later, your toys start moving on their own and the sky outside your house turns a pulsing shade of orange, don’t, for the love of all that is holy, OPEN THE FRONT DOOR!

Raiders of the Lost Ark

Kid: One of Sallah’s 8 or 9 kids
We’re not sure which one it is, but the one who screams “Me! Me!” as Indy is helping them up into a truck following his very-nearly violent encounter with Belloq in a local café. Ease up, kid. The guy just saw his girlfriend get blown up. A little patience, please.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

Kid: Gertie (Drew Barrymore)
This movie already had enough artificial sweetener in it to give all the lab rats in the world cancer, so the last thing it needed was a lispy little girl in ponytails. We barely tolerated this character the first time around when she was called Cindy Brady.

Twilight Zone: The Movie

Kids: All the young elderly kids
Twilight Zone: The Movie opens with the classic line “want to see something really scary?” and proceeds to show a demonic Dan Aykroyd devour Albert Brooks. So it must get really twisted from that point on, huh? Well, kinda, so long as you ignore Spielberg’s segment, which is about a bunch of old farts who turn into bratty kids. Way to kill the terror momentum with a Metamucil commercial, Steve.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

Kid: Short Round (Jonathan Ke Quan)
For a movie directed by a guy battling allegations of Asian racism after 1941, Short Round was a bold character choice. And also—Indiana Jones does not need “cute,” and he certainly doesn’t need to be screeched at by a pint-sized Charlie Chan.

Hook

Kid: Rufio (Dante Basco)
Hook itself is mostly a two-hour test of your patience, but the final straw comes when we meet Rufio, the “leader” of the fabled Lost Boys. That’s right, this extra from a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle dance sequence is suppose to be a pirate-fighting badass. Jack Sparrow could take this kid with both mascara-caked eyes closed.

Jurassic Park

Kid: Tim Murphy (Joseph Mazzello)
Nobody likes a preening little know-it-all. In fact, Tim is so irritating that when he finally gets bug-zapped by a giant electric fence it has been known to inspire spontaneous outbursts of applause.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park

Kid: Kelly Curtis Malcolm (Vanessa Lee Chester)
They awkwardly shoehorn in a mysterious daughter for Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm just so she can, at some point, use her gymnastic skills to evade raptors? The Kelly character is the movie equivalent of your appendix—it can be removed entirely without any impact whatsoever, but if it’s allowed to hang around and fester it can kill you.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence

Kid: David (Haley Joel Osment)
A robot that is programmed to love complains that it’s not being loved enough? Does your Mr. Coffee complain when you fail to ask it to join you for a cup? Bonus annoying points go to the human brat who wakes up from a coma and gets David banished to Thunderdome.

War of the Worlds

Kid: Rachel Ferrier (Dakota Fanning)
Sorry, what was that? We couldn’t hear you over ALL THE SCREAMING. Let the aliens take over if it means we can have a few seconds peace from Fanning’s lung siren. We wonder how many times screenwriter David Koepp had to write “meanwhile, Rachel screams.” We’re betting by page 5 he had already shortened it to “SFX – RACHEL.”

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Kid: Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf)
No way. No way does the union of world-class action hero Indiana Jones and brassy crap-kicker Marion Ravenwood produce this. A wispy wannabe greaser who fences? This is not the Jones bloodline. Maybe Marion is mistaken. Maybe she actually had a brief affair with Adam Shankman and failed to do the proper missed period math.

The Adventures of Tin Tin: The Secret of the Unicorn

Kid: Tin Tin (Jamie Bell)
We know this hasn’t been released yet, but c’mon…do you honestly believe the “hero” of this Belgian mash-up of Archie and Little Orphan Annie is going to be anything less than two hours of ze nails on the, how you say? Oh, yes, ze chalkboard.