Movie Review: Cheaper by the Dozen

Cheaper by the Dozen (2003) 

Directed by Shawn Levy 

Written by Sam Harper, Joel Cohen, Alec Sokolow 

Starring Steve Martin, Paula Marshall, Richard Jenkins, Bonnie Hunt, Tom Welling, Hillary Duff

Release Date December 25th, 2003 

Published December 21st, 2003

I should have seen this coming. The warning signs were there. A preview screening nearly a month before the film’s release. A script adaptation credited to eight--yes, I said eight--writers. And a director who aspires to mediocrity because mediocre would be an improvement over what he's done before. Nevertheless, I still happily attended the screening of Cheaper By The Dozen because I thought Steve Martin can't possibly make a film that bad. I could not have been more wrong.

The plot description for this film is somewhat difficult because it's essentially a series of sub-sitcom level moments of family comedy. Martin stars as a football coach in a small Illinois town. He and his wife, played by Bonnie Hunt (also one of the eight credited writers), are unique because they were high school sweethearts who have been married for 22 years, and they have 12 children. Their family farm house is an absolute mess of toys and small animals and sporting equipment. Meanwhile, each of the kids have a handy little quirk to help us tell them apart. The archetypes are classic ABC TGIF kids: the tomboy, the prissy one, the really smart one, the fat kid and so on and so forth. It saves the time of having to write 12 individual characters.

The plot, such as it is, has Martin's character accepting a new job at a big college. So, the family packs up and moves to a Chicago suburb where they meet their neighbors, played by Alan Ruck and Paula Marshall. (Poor Marshall has the thankless task of playing the only-in-the-movies type of bitch character that says horribly insensitive things and will get her comeuppance by the end of the film.) However Marshall isn't nearly as abused as poor Richard Jenkins. Slumming from his role as the coolest dead guy on TV on HBO's Six Feet Under, Jenkins play Martin's best friend and new boss who is required to be inhumanly stupid. It is poor Mr. Jenkins’ character who forces Martin to choose between his job and his 12 kids. Well golly, what do you think he will choose?

Hunt's character writes a book about her family that lands on the bestseller list, forcing her to leave the family for a few days for a book tour. Golly, do you think dad can handle taking care of all of those kids by himself? I don't know about you, but I think we’re in for hijinks here. The kids trash a neighbor’s birthday party by accidentally releasing a snake in the house. Again it's poor Marshall who takes the brunt of that beating.

Oh it gets worse.

Teen stars Hillary Duff and Tom Welling play the family's two older children. In adjusting to their new high school, these two actors who look like fashion models are required by the script to be outcasts at their new school. It reminded me of the movie She's All That where Rachel Leigh Cook was considered a nerd because she wore glasses and baggy clothes, except that Welling and Duff never look like anything but the Gap models they are in real life.

Martin stretches and strains all over the screen trying to make this forced, stupid material work and the strain shows in every moment of the film. If you thought his Bringing Down The House character was forced, you will be shocked that this character is actually worse.

Director Shawn Levy cut his teeth on Nickelodeon and Disney Channel TV series’ until getting his big break directing 2003's very first worst movie of the year, Just Married. So how fitting that he should bookend 2003 with its final worst movie of the year. Cheaper By The Dozen is an awful movie. A sub-Brady Bunch sitcom, full of forced jokes and cheap contrived melodrama.

In the words of my hero, Roger Ebert, who used this phrase to sum up his feelings about the film North, "I HATED, HATED, HATED, HATED, HATED THIS MOVIE".

Movie Review Just Married

Just Married (2003) 

Directed by Shawn Levy 

Written by Sam Harper 

Starring Ashton Kutcher, Brittany Murphy, Christian Kane, Monet Mazur, Taran Killam

Release Date January 10th, 2003 

Published January 9th, 2003

Another January, another slate of less than stellar movies from the Hollywood swill factory. Okay, Just Married isn't quite that bad, but it's not very good either.

Just Married stars Ashton Kutcher and Brittany Murphy as a pair of twenty-somethings who fall in love and get married. He's a sports nut who works part time at a radio station doing midnight traffic reports. She is a waspy princess from Bel Air whose father (David Rasche, king of the asshole wasps) owns a pair of sports teams. Opposites attract as they say and soon after meeting they are married and off for a European honeymoon.

The film begins with the pair returning from Europe ready to kill one another. In flashback, Tom (Kutcher) explains how they met when he popped her in the face with a football on a beach. They then bonded over a game of pool and sex on their first date. Things proceed quickly as, still in flashback, we find that they moved in together after only a month of dating.

Tom then regales the mistakes each made that would come back to haunt them. First, we find that Tom accidentally killed Sarah's (Murphy) dog, then lied about it. We then learn on their wedding day that Sarah had slept with an ex-boyfriend whom she had told Tom was just a platonic friend. Of course, the ex-boyfriend is a rich guy named Peter (Christian Kane) whom Sarah's family adores.

From there, the flashback jumps ahead to the Honeymoon where things go bad from the start. After arriving in France and getting the wrong rental car, they arrive at their luxury hotel. Once there, Tom manages to nearly destroy the place with a sextoy. Well gee, it's a romantic comedy. Do you think Tom and Sarah will overcome their problems and help love prevail? I will leave the mystery.

Director Shawn Levy brings nothing new to this tired genre comedy. The only thing the film has going for it is the likability of the actors involved. Without them, Just Married would easily be one of the worst films I have seen. Brittany Murphy's huge brown eyes and bubbly energetic personality make her so amazingly likable you forgive the ridiculousness of the plot she is trapped in.

As for Kutcher, he has his moments, especially towards the end when he lets his manic comic energy overcome him. His rage at trying to get through the fence surrounding Sarah's parent's mansion is the only really funny moment of the film.

Just Married is an unoriginal wrongheaded, poorly directed cliche. A film that has been done to death and should not be made at all. If not for its appealing stars, Just Married would be interminable. With them, the film is almost tolerable. 

Movie Review Night at the Museum Battle of the Smithsonian

Night at the Museum Battle of the Smithsonian

Directed by Shawn Levy 

Written by Thomas Lennon, Robert Ben Garant 

Starring Ben Stiller, Robin Williams, Amy Adams, Hank Azaria, Christopher Guest 

Release Date May 22nd 2009 

Published May 21st, 2009 

It was a novel idea. Museum characters come to life at night thanks to a magical golden tablet from ancient Egypt. The premise of the 2006 Night at the Museum was destined to succeed on novelty alone. What a shame it was that no one thought to add depth, complexity or humor beyond the fall down, go boom variety.

But, as I said, the original Night at the Museum had novelty on its side. Now comes Night at the Museum Battle of the Smithsonian and the novelty has definitely worn off. What's left is a sloppy mess of out of control comic actors riffing into oblivion, searching blindly for jokes as they dress in funny costumes.

Ben Stiller is back as Larry Daley. Since we last met Larry he has given up the night watchman gig for one as an inventor and cheese ball late night infomercial star. Sure, he goes back to the museum on occasion where he is for some reason allowed to come in at night and wander around after everyone has left and apparently he was never replaced? On his next visit to the museum, Larry finds that his old friends who come to life at night are being carted up and shipped off to storage at the National Archives, beneath the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. Larry spends one last night with his friends and then accepts that it's over.

Well, of course it's not over. Larry's old pal the slapping capuchin monkey stole the gold tablet before he left and now he and the other museum dwellers are under siege beneath the Smithsonian, attacked by an evil awakened Egyptian pharaoh, KahMunRah (Hank Azaria). Now Larry must travel to Washington, sneak into the archives and save his friends.

Along the way, wouldn't you know it, he makes a bunch of new friends including Abe Lincoln, from the Lincoln memorial, Rodin's The Thinker (the voice of Hank Azaria), General George Custer (Bill Hader) and most importantly, Amelia Earhart (Amy Adams) whose nose for adventure turns her into Larry's partner and briefly his love match.

My explanation of the plot gives it far more order and structure than is actually in the movie. The film itself, once again directed with hack imprecision by Shawn Levy and written by the slipshod, logic free duo of Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant, rolls out plot points and characters and leaves them dangling with little to do but look funny, even as they don't do or say anything funny.

As they did in the first film, Levy, Lennon and Garant are convinced that the premise is the movie. Museum characters come to life, boom we're done. That's it, they set up the premise and hope that a movie develops around it. It doesn't. This strands Stiller and Azaria especially, who spend minutes of screentime performing improv material, searching in vain for a joke not supplied to them.

As Azaria and Stiller grope for jokes, Oscar nominee Adams steals scene after scene on sheer energy and cuteness. She's just as stranded as everyone else in this plotless mess but at least she's got that smile and natural beauty to fall back on. Stiller and Azaria are clearly better when the joke is given to them and not when they have to dig it out of a plotless morass.

Now, this is me asking the question that I am not supposed to ask. The director and writers of Night at the Museum don't care about this, hence why they don't supply the answer. Nevertheless, I am baffled by the physics of the tablet. It brings museum pieces to life at night right? But, how close do they have to be to the tablet? Once you are brought to life does the tablet matter? How close does a museum piece have to be to come to life? In the first film it was just the New York Museum of Art, in the sequel it is the Smithsonian but as we learn the Smithsonian is several museums plus the Lincoln memorial. Do they have to have seen the tablet to come to life? I know I am not supposed to care but it irritated me.

This is definitely a brain free environment but I was irritated by the anything goes, nothing matters approach of Night at the Museum Battle of the Smithsonian. Maybe, I would be more forgiving if the movie were funnier. I understand that what is required here, because this is merely a product, is that it is safe for kids (Won't scare'em or offend their delicate sensibilities) and that it is bright, cheery and loud but I can't get past the idea that every movie, even those created only as products, should aspire to something slightly more.

Night at the Museum Battle of the Smithsonian has zero aspiration, zero rules, zero plot and most egregiously, zero laughs.

Movie Review Night at the Museum

Night at the Museum (2006) 

Directed by Shawn Levy

Written by Thomas Lennon, Robert Ben Garant 

Starring Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Dick Van Dyke, Steve Coogan, Carla Gugino, Robin Williams 

Release Date December 22nd, 2006 

Published December 21st, 2006 

As movie pedigrees go, Night at the Museum could not have an uglier ancestry. Directed by Shawn Levy, the man behind both The Pink Panther and Cheaper By the Dozen, and written by Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant, who despite being brilliant on TV's Reno 911 have written scripts for cinematic flotsam like Taxi, Let's Go To Prison and The Pacifier. Ugh!

It is a wonder then how they managed to net, for their latest movie Night At the Museum, some all star comedians for an all star cast. Led by Ben Stiller, the cast also includes Owen Wilson, Steve Coogan, Ricky Gervais and Robin Williams. However, even a cast as brilliant as this cannot overcome the work of the behind the scenes 'talent' at work on Night at the Museum, an aggressively aggravating work of computer generated ridiculousness and family movie clichés.

I must admit, the idea behind Night at the Museum is very clever. At night at the natural history museum in New York the exhibits come to life and wreak havoc thanks to a mummy's curse. It's up to the new night security guard Larry (Ben Stiller) to keep the chaos from spilling out into the streets of New York and keep the exhibits from perishing in the light of day.

Larry is left this task after three longtime night guards, played by legends Dick Van Dyke, Mickey Rooney and Bill Cobbs, are let go. Let's just say they are a little bitter about being let go. They are kind enough to leave Larry an instruction manual but when Larry gets cocky, thinking he knows how to handle this situation, things go from weird to worse.

Larry would not have taken this job but his ex-wife Erica (Kim Raver) threatened to take away his son Nick (Jake Cherry) if he didn't find a steady job and place to live. No points for guessing that Nick will get in on the museum madness. You also get no points for guessing that the pretty museum tour guide, played by Spy Kids star Carla Gugino, will become Larry's love interest.

The best part of Night at the Museum is Robin Williams as President Teddy Roosevelt. Coming to life nightly to ride his horse throughout the museum, Williams' Mr. President is the most helpful of the museum exhibits and of course when it comes to delivering the moral of the story who better than a former President. Of course, Williams can't help but ham it up a little, but you expect that from Robin Williams.

Ben Stiller seems at a loss to keep up with the goofy CGI madness of Night at the Museum. Rushed through the exposition, his character is essentially a deadbeat who nearly loses his kid because he's so lazy. Not exactly a winning character. Once inside the museum, Stiller's Larry vacillates from coward to cocky but mostly just runs around confused and angry.

Director Shawn Levy and writers Garant and Lennon hit all of the typical family movie beats, a lesson learned, bathroom humor and a monkey. They also toss in a couple action movie clichés for good measure including a chase scene involving an ancient stagecoach and a miniature SUV. Trust me, my description reads far more interesting than the actual scene.

With comic talent like Stiller, Williams, Wilson et al, it would seem impossible for the film to completely fail and I guess it doesn't fail completely. Stiller can't help but wring a few laughs out of a character who's only characteristic is frustration. Frustration is Stiller's milieu. Owen Wilson and Steve Coogan have a good banter but their parts are tiny, literally and figuratively.

Ricky Gervais really gets short shrift. Why hire one of England's premiere comic talents for a role that doesn't give him any room to breathe. As the crusty museum curator, Gervais has no jokes in the movie, he is simply in place to punish Stiller's Larry and then disappear. It's as if he was hired just to make the film more profitable in England where having his name on the poster might sell a few tickets.

I honestly wonder if comedians like Ben Stiller and Robin Williams accept parts in movies like Night at the Museum in some kind of Hollywood style community service program. Studio heads put it out there that if stars will work on family movie garbage like Night at the Museum then they will get the chance to work on projects the stars really want to make. Can there be any other explanation as to why talented people make such terrible films, often in this basest of genres?

I cannot deny that at the screening I attended the target audience for Night at the Museum laughed loudly and often. Little children will, sadly, find a lot they enjoy about Night at the Museum which manages to find a number of lowest common denominator moments just for the kids. For my money however, I can't imagine why, with a satisfying, smart and genuinely touching family film in theaters like Charlotte's Web, why anyone would waste money on Night at the Museum.

Is it just that Night at the Museum is louder than Charlotte's Web? I'm just trying to understand.

Movie Review: Date Night

Date Night (2010) 

Directed by Shawn Levy

Written by Josh Klausner 

Starrive Steve Carell, Tina Fey, Ray Liotta, Common, Jimmy Simpson

Release Date April 9th, 2010 

Published April 8th, 2010

A couple of bored New Jersey-ites decide to mix up their routine with a trip to the big city and find themselves mixed up in a murderous plot involving gangsters, crooked cops and dirty politicians in the new comedy Date Night starring Tina Fey and Steve Carell and directed by mainstream machinist Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum 1 & 2).

Shawn Levy has never been what anyone would call an auteur. Levy is, without a doubt, a craftsman but more along the lines of an amateur carpenter than a master builder. Levy's films tend to unfold with a solid plan in mind and end up as rickety, half completed disasters. To be fair, the half completed parts can be quite entertaining and have proven exceptionally popular.

How nice then that Levy's latest rickety contraption, Date Night, actually shows the director becoming a better craftsman. Unlike the Night at the Museum movies, Date Night has a quick pace, oodles of charm, and more than a few really big laughs. It helps to have a pair of very, very funny leads to carry the audience over the trouble spots. As Phil and Claire Foster, Steve Carell and Tina Fey do a remarkable job of portraying a marriage with a little dust on it. The routine of once a week dinners, lame book clubs and time spent with fellow dusty married couples is so well evoked that you can't wait for the expected wackiness to ensue.

The wackiness arrives when Phil and Claire, frightened by the recently announced divorce of a longtime friends, break from their routine for a night in New York City. The couple want to have dinner at a swanky new restaurant in Manhattan but they don't have a reservation. When another couple doesn't show, Phil boldly claims the reservation and the identity of the missing couple.

That couple, unfortunately, happens to be the missing link between a mob boss (Ray Liotta) and some dirty cops (Jimmi Simpson and Common) and a shady politician. When the dirty cops come after the Foster's one wild night ensues as they evade the bad guys with the help of a hunky security expert played by a shirtless Mark Wahlberg.

The plot is creaky and as well aged as Claire and Phil's marriage routine. The key to making it work lies with Carell and Fey's ability to sell the goofball, over the top gags and sell they do, Carell and Fey make a top notch comic duo. Scene after scene, whether Phil and Claire are sharing a quiet meal, poking quiet fun at fellow diners, or running from a hail of bullets or in a wild car chase, Carell and Fey make the most of their terrific comic chemistry to draw big laughs.

If you like the Steve Carell and Tina Fey you know from TV then you will like Phil and Claire. Director Levy cleverly plays the story to the strengths of his stars and they reward him by taking thin characters and a well worn plot and make something surprisingly, hilariously more of it.

With any other cast Date Night would crash and burn. With Steve Carell and Tina Fey Date Night becomes a fast paced, laugh out loud riot; stay for the credits which tack on a few more big laughs in Carell and Fey's blunders and ad libs. Shawn Levy may never be a great director but with the right cast and the right material he is an effective director and that is all that was needed for Date Night.

Movie Review: The Pink Panther

The Pink Panther (2006) 

Directed by Shawn Levy 

Written by Len Blum, Steve Martin 

Starring Steve Martin, Kevin Kline, Jean Reno, Emily Mortimer, Beyonce Knowles

Release Date February 10th, 2006

Published February 9th, 2006 

It’s not that Steve Martin is no longer a funny guy but, with his last few pictures, save for the exceptional romantic drama Shopgirl, he has really stunk up the joint. Cheaper By The Dozen 1 & 2 and his teaming with Queen Latifah in Bringing Down the House are vapid exercises in the most tired of cliches. The streak of joyless and mostly humorless comedies continues with The Pink Panther, a flailing cannibalization of the famous Peter Sellers film series.

Inspector Jaques Clouseau (Martin) is the model of ineptitude. As a gendarme of the French police, Clousseau's beat has long been the one place where he could do the least amount of damage. However, when the French national soccer coach (action star Jason Statham in a brief cameo) is murdered and his legendary pink panther diamond stolen from his dead body, it is Clousseau who is given the high-profile case.

The chief of French Police Dreyfus (Kevin Kline) chose Clouseau not for his investigatory skill, but rather to be the public face of the investigation. While Clouseau screws up in front of the cameras, Dreyfus and his team can solve the case behind the scenes and then take all the credit. To insure Clouseau does not screw up too badly, he is assigned a partner, Gendarme Gilbert Ponton (Jean Reno), who will attempt to keep Clouseau out of trouble.

Pop star Beyonce Knowles shows up as Xania, an international pop star, solely for the purposes of eye candy and for the soundtrack synergy. The pop star has no relevance to what there is of a plot. Poor Emily Mortimer, playing Clouseau's secretary, is stuck with the thankless role of his love interest, leaving Beyonce to merely provide the film with a marketable pop song for the soundtrack CD.

Once you accept that this is not much of a movie and more of a sketch-comedy exercise, the whole thing comes down to how funny these sketches are. And within that limited criteria, the results are quite mixed. The Pink Panther is exceptionally hit and miss. Certain scenes, such as Clouseau's introduction to Chief Inspector Dreyfuss, are laugh out loud funny. However, the sketches that don't work, like the attempts at bawdy adult humor or Clouseau's dirty-old-man infatuation with Xania, are far more uncomfortable than funny.

Director Shawn Levy is to the comedy genre what Uwe Boll is to sci fi. Okay, maybe he isn't quite that bad. Mr. Boll does set quite a standard, but for the relative ease of his chosen genre, the family comedy, Levy is unquestionably a hack. He can point the camera and capture what is in frame, but he has zero insight into how one scene should flow to the next. Levy has no sense of how to establish a comic or dramatic flow, no sense of storytelling and he has the visual sense of a blind squirrel.

I have not seen the original Pink Panther since the era of the large-form laser disc, so my memory of Peter Sellers as Clouseau is spotty at best. I know from experiencing other films of Director Blake Edwards, who directed Sellers in the original, that he is a far superior director to Shawn Levy, so it seems safe to assume that this new Pink Panther cannot match the original. Call that observation unfair or uninformed if you like, but it's inescapable that Levy is not a great director.

As for comparing Steve Martin and the legendary Mr. Sellers, I have to believe that Steve Martin certainly could match the talent of Peter Sellers. I have seen so much great work from Steve Martin, granted not much recently, that I have to believe him capable of being Peter Sellers' equal. In this film however, with this director, Martin is at a loss to bring this legendary character to life. Martin flails and falls with vigor but it's all for naught. Martin's goose was cooked the second Shawn Levy was named director.

So what, if anything, works in Pink Panther? For Steve Martin being, a complete failure at drawing laughs is impossible. Martin works very hard for what few laughs he gets in this dreadful film, but he does get a few and most come from his teaming with Jean Reno. In a better film, Martin and Reno could have riffed two complete funny performances but in Reno's sporadic screen-time, often cut short for more of Martin's dirty old man bit or the film's bizarre extended James Bond riff, they only have time for a few funny moments, the film's funniest moments.

Also, the teaming of Martin and Kevin Kline as Chief Inspector Dreyfus is inspired, but as with many of the ideas that went into this movie, the teaming is half-baked. Kline has only a handful of scenes with Martin, some very funny, some very much not. Like Martin's teaming with Reno, I watched Martin work with Kline and longed for a different, far better film to feature these two exceptionally talented actors.

The Pink Panther has been marketed as a family movie, so I should warn parents that the family movie tag was one forced upon the film. The Pink Panther was intended as an outrageous borderline R-rated comedy filled to overflow with prurient humor about Viagra, Beyonce Knowles' fine form, and a running gag about Martin and Emily Mortimer getting caught in compromising positions. The Viagra and the leering Clouseau's creepy eyeing of Knowles remain, as does the running gag about Martin and Mortimer, though I understand in much shorter form. These jokes do not belong in a supposed family movie.

Some might say if Sony, the studio that took over the prized property after purchasing MGM, mandated these changes that I should cut director Shawn Levy some slack. I would, if I thought these naughty scenes that are now either truncated or cut completely had the potential to be funny, but I don't see that. Watching what is left of the initial Pink Panther cut, I think Sony likely performed a salvage and rescue rather than the destruction of something bawdy and brilliant. 

Remakes are, more often than not, lazy cash grabs, and while there is little about Steve Martin's performance in Pink Panther that could be called lazy, there is an unquestionable stench of greed and the desire to cash in on a well known property. Worse yet, there is unshakable malaise around The Pink Panther that even Martin at his most manic cannot escape. Whether it comes from director Shawn Levy's poor direction or the general laziness of remakes is debatable.The Pi