Are We There Yet?

The one bright spot in this generally junky movie was Aliesha Allen's singing. I was very disappointed to see that she is no longer making films.

I've been made fun of for enjoying Are We There Yet which is unfortunate! Despite the flaws this movie has it warms my heart. Ice Cube is great through out and so are the kids. Not for everyone but I love this movie the way it is! Adventure stories are great to me even the unorthodox ones at least occasionally.

Are We There Yet? pits Ice Cube as a bumbling dad of sorts who deals with mischievous kids - it's like a modern "Home Alone" but without criminals, and also the fact that it's bad. In this case, the hard type formula in charge of naughty children ("The Pacifier", "Daddy Day Care") is used again. If before the protagonists were Vin Diesel or Arnold Schwarzenegger, now the tough man is Ice Cube, the rapper of rough letters that now declares "I wanna be like Eddie Murphy."

If already the starting point is not very promising, in the hands of Brian Levant ("Problem Child 2", "The Flintstones", "Beethoven, etc.), vulgarity arrives To unbearable extremes. It's a series of repetitive grown men falling down scenes and all sorts of bland old hi-jinks. Ice Cube is dating a woman with two mischievous kids, as she asks him to drive them to Vancouver in Canada to see her at a business trip. Ice Cube must deal with the kids treating him as "the enemy", pulling slapstick pranks here and there, forgiving them in the end, and making the once controversial rapper succumb to family films. AWTY? is repetitive and weak.

Family films of the 2000s are particularly bad, although AWTY? is at least entertaining. Seeing this movie can be worse if we do not transmute our mind to that of a 7 year old. Funny, but unprecedented. I, in the case of the protagonist, had committed a murder. But I have nothing to worry about is pure fantasy.

"Are We There Yet?" is a cheesy, well-intentioned family comedy. The film will almost certainly wreck it in a minute or two with some stupid notion gone wrong. The lengthy use of a bobblehead is a fairly realistic representation of how the film fails.

The more I study film ideas, the more I'm amazed at how some ideas continue to live.

Take the notion of humorous cruelty. Were the Stooges the first to build a franchise around this? In modern times, it is the "Home Alone" franchise where we are given an excuse for accepting the cruelties because the hurter is a clever but innocent child and the hurtees are stereotypical bad guys.

Here the idea tries a new incarnation. Lest there be any mistake about the source, the movie actually starts in the "old" Home Alone mode with our (anonymous) victim encountering tripwires that trigger child-made traps of household goods and toys.

Then it shifts into the new mode. In this edition, some of the tricks are intended and some are not. The victim is a new kind of shiftless: a black man actually trying to be "ghetto." The story is supposed to smoothly morph in a sort of "What About Bob" way from pain to rewarding relationship. The turning point is also stereotypical: the treasured black dad has abandoned his family and the beleaguered suitor is revealed to be someone to whom that also happened.

I think humor about race, especially racial stereotypes, is fair game. How better to puncture racism? But its got to be funny doesn't it?

This picture turns out to be what it starts to be about: a way of torturing a black dude who manages a slick appearance of the ghetto (we're talking about the guy who calls himself Ice Cube here, not his character) and tries to put himself where he doesn't belong. Poignant maybe, but neither funny nor endearing.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.