I watched this for Miranda Cosgrove alone but even with her presence I’ve been putting off watching it for a long time – only recently, I got the woefully mistaken impression from a bunch of stills of the movie that she’s in it more than I’d previously imagined, so I finally took the time. The problem is, there are 17 other kids in this movie who aren’t Miranda Cosgrove, lol … and they’re all, just, everywhere. True, one of them is Drake Bell (of Drake and Josh, which Miranda is best known for), and there’s Rene Russo in the cast, too. But none of this helps as much as it should. I hesitate to say Mark Kermode’s name yet again in one of my reviews, but the fact is, he’s the best critic there is at the moment as far as I’m concerned, and he has this 5-laugh rule for comedies which is really the best way to talk about this movie. If a movie doesn’t make you laugh 5 times, he says, then it simply is not a comedy. This made me very lightly chuckle, practically a sigh of a laugh, but twice in its 90 minutes, with one loud laugh which admittedly was perhaps just desperation but, for the record, came from this line – “Hands up who lives here! Anyone else left remaining here after 5 minutes will be forcibly conscripted into the United States Coast Guard.” Oh and “Remember the old you? Spanking is never the answer!” kinda made me chuckle a little heavier, I guess. But that’s literally it.

It’s pretty extraordinarily dull. And I can only take it back to my first comment. There are 18 kids in this movie, and attempts are made to create stories concerning most of them. It’s just too much to have any focus whatsoever, too much to get attached to anything. One of my favourite lessons when I was learning about screenwriting was KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid – and the writer here seems never to have grasped that. From the outset, it just never has a remote chance of being anything worth your time. I really can’t understand how anybody could actually read this script and be like, omg, I simply must do this, it’s hilarious. If anything, it should’ve been a sitcom … you could run the whole gamut of typical sitcom stories with this set-up … though then I guess I’d never watch it. Unless Miranda was in it. Miranda gets the movie one star. But if she comes along and reads this she’s welcome to take it away for herself, lol. If you really must watch a movie like this, might I recommend The Pacifier, which it resembled to me a lot and which is (surprisingly) infinitely better. When a movie’s big ending is that they finally manage to record an answering machine message (even if that does mean stupidly calling out all 20 family members’ names), you really should consider whether you shouldn’t try coming up with a different story to tell.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 at 2:10 am in 1 heart, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.