...the film is about children who are so selfish they ensure their parents are as unhappy as the audience.
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Based on the same Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Jr., and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey book as the charming 1950 movie, this 2003 remake brings to a complete shambles what had been in the earlier film a pleasant, turn-of-the-century story of family life. If you liked the old movie, I'd advise your buying or renting it, as it is now also available on DVD. Anything to avoid this current catastrophe.
Updated to the present, the new "Cheaper By the Dozen" stars Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt as the parents of twelve children, aged five through twenty-two, who are so obnoxious as to make any married couple swear off kids forever. The director, Shawn Levy, previously did "Just Married" and "Big Fat Liar" and seems to be making a career out of these frivolous, humorless affairs. Yet the movies keep making money hand over fist. Go figure. Maybe there's a dearth of family-oriented pictures these days, and the public will grab onto any title they think might be decent.
Martin and Hunt play Tom and Kate Baker, the names having been changed from the original, semiautobiographical book. It's easy to see why Martin's character could want such a big family. Comedians like a big audience. But it's harder to understand how the trim and youthful, thirty-nine-year-old Bonnie Hunt could be mistaken for someone who had produced twelve children. Only in Hollywood.
The oldest daughter, Nora, is played by Piper Perabo. Nora is a beauteous young lady currently living away from the family with a slacker, Hank, played by an uncredited Ashton Kutcher. Perabo and Kutcher place a burden on the film's wholesome meter by being unwed yet sleeping together. Anyway, Perabo's character behaves much more maturely than anyone else in the film, while Kutcher's character is a typically Kutcher character, meaning he's fundamentally useless, in this case a would-be actor and model who watches his one-and-only TV commercial all day.
When the movie opens, the Baker family are living in an impossibly ideal country house in the Midwest, the Baker kids are impossibly cute, and the Baker parents are impossibly kind and tolerant and patient. Tom is the well-loved coach of a local small-college football team, and Kate is a writer who has given up a big-city newspaper job to become a full-time mom. This is the kind of family that's so together they eat all three of their daily meals as a group, and cuddly-sweet things continue to happen like frogs hopping down from the light fixtures into the morning breakfast food.
The movie follows virtually no plot, made up primarily of a series of episodes displaying the eccentric family's eccentric actions. The most important story conflict involves the parents' decision to move to another house when the father is offered a high-paid coaching job at a big college, and the mother publishes a book about raising twelve children called, what else, "Cheaper By the Dozen." Naturally, the children hate the move, hate their parents for making them move, and plan to disrupt the idea.
Not only do the kids attempt to destroy the notion of moving, they destroy any semblance of reality in the narrative. This movie is not intended as pure farce; it's not an "Airplane" or a "Pink Panther" or even a "Super Troopers." It's meant to be taken as a humorous exaggeration of reality. Yet real life plays no part in the proceedings.
There are twelve kids in the family, and the mother's got glassware everywhere around the house. Why? Waiting to be broken in some amusing way, naturally. In the film's only concession to the earlier, 1950 film, when the family move from the country to the city suburbs, they find a house that looks from the outside like a Victorian mansion and is even more elaborate on the inside. Anywhere in the San Francisco Bay Area where I live, such a place would go for at least $2,000,000. They get it in the Midwest on a coach's salary. OK.
When the younger children get to their new school, every other kid in the place hates and abuses them. Why? Who knows? For the good of the story, I guess. When the oldest teen goes out for the high school football team, he's ridiculed and assigned the lowest position possible for no other reason than that he's from out of town. And nobody, not a single other kid on the team nor any of the high school coaches recognize that he's the son of the most famous sports figure in the area, not even after the father's name and face appear in every newspaper in the city and he's interviewed daily on ESPN. Credibility is not this film's strong suit.
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[release]11996[/release]