Search - Are We There Yet? on DVD

Cringing throughout a comedy is not a good thing

Lawrance M. Bernabo | The Zenith City, Duluth, Minnesota | 06/17/2005

(3 out of 5 stars)

"There is quite a bit of perilous tightrope walking involved in mixing violent slapstick comedy and heartfelt pathos. Charlie Chaplin did it a lot and you can certainly point to the original "Home Alone" as being a successful mix. But in the former the target of the physical attacks was usually some guy twice the Little Tramp's size and in the latter it was the Wet Bandits. That is not the case with "Are We There Yet?" There are certainly some laughs to be had in this 2005 comedy, but for the most part I find myself cringing at what was happening on screen and the only reason director Brian Levant's film gets 3 stars is because there are a few success and rather important moments of pathos in this mess.

Nick Persons (Ice Cube) has an upper scale sports collectible store and a brand-new Lincoln Navigator, when he is smitten by the sight of Suzanne Kingston (Nia Long). The bad news is that she is a single mom with a pair of terror tots, Lindsy (Aleisha Allen) and Kevin (Philip Daniel Bolden), who have been taking care of all of mom's would-be boyfriends. They are waiting for their mom to reconcile with their dad. Nick wants nothing to do with children, but he and Suzanne become friends and when she has to go to Vancouver for work and her ex-husband bails on having the kids for New Year's, he ends up agreeing to transport the kids and the madness begins.

The core problem here is that these kids are viscous little monsters who physically assault innocent men. This is not cute little Kevin hurting the bad guys who are trying to rob his home, but two kids going after every guy who wants to date their mother. It is not funny it is mean. It is also dangerous, which gets us to another key problem with this movie in terms of how many times the attempted humor has to do with cars and trucks. In other words, situations that in the real world would get these kids killed are repeatedly done for laughs in this movie. Watching a couple of kids screaming while the car they are in is squeezed against the railing on the highway by a fully loaded semi-truck is not all that funny in the real world and we kept cringing through all of these types of scenes (there are several). Granted, it is not wise to confuse a movie with the real world, but there are moments when this film wants to talk to the reality that there are a large number of African-American children being raised without their fathers living in the house. More importantly, those are the best moments in the film.

This is because Nick is not a bad guy, which is the flip side to the core problem, and another reason to cringe every time they go after him. Nick thinks he does not like children and this particular pair of demons give him ample reason to reinforce that idea, but when these children need help, physical or psychological, he immediately goes to their help. The latter is the more important part, because you know full well that these children are going to get their comeuppance when they find out the truth about their father and the moments in which Nick talks to the kids, as opposed to screaming or sticking out his tongue at them, are the best moments in this film because they are the most real.

The fault for this film is to be found in the screenplay by Steven Gary Banks, Claudia Grazioso, J. David Stem and David N. Weiss (four writers is rarely a good sign), because the performances by Ice Cub and the two kids are fine given what was written (Long is reduced to a minor part in the story, which is why the resolution is problematic for me). Jay Mohr has a small part in this film as Marty, Nick's friend who keeps reminding him of how much he does not like kids, and Tracy Morgan does the voice of the Satchel Paige bobble-head doll that Nick has on the dashboard of his vehicle (who does Nick think will be watching DVDs in the backseat if he does not like children?). It was also great to see Nichelle Nichols in a bit part as Miss Mable. What would have been even better was a film that dealt more realistically with the basic idea, which is certainly an important one."