Our Rating: 1.00
Who would have thought that a movie starring Steve Martin and the delightful Bonnie Hunt could have not one redeeming quality? It’s ostensibly a remake of the 1950 Walter Lang comedy, though latter-day audiences will detect a far greater kinship to an early episode of “The Brady Bunch” with twice the brats. College football coach Tom Baker (Martin) moves his entire bloated family to a new community to take advantage of a coveted job opportunity, but the change inspires more dissent than harmony within his chaotic household. Wait a minute … Steve Martin coaching college football? Yep, that’s the kind of incongruity you’re dealing with here, wrapped like a sore thumb in a scripted gauze of Cold War anachronisms that mark the whole project as terminally square. (The death of a pet frog is treated as a major plot point.) There are roles for Hilary Duff, “Smallville’s” Tom Welling, “Coyote Ugly’s” Piper Perabo and the ever-execrable Ashton Kutcher, who makes a stab at clip-reel immortality by reciting the line, “I’m not that good of an actor,” on camera and in front of a room full of witnesses.
This article appears in Dec 24-30, 2003.