Unaccompanied Minors (DVD)
APPROX. 90 MINS. - PROD. YEAR: 2006 - MPA RATING: PG
" The kids in the film behave badly. The adults behave worse.
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You know a movie on DVD is in trouble when the best part of it is the time your wife kicks you out of the room to vacuum. I cherished those few minutes.
"Unaccompanied Minors" was easily the worst comedy of 2006. Maybe the worst film of any kind of 2006.
Not one laugh. Not one smile. Not one hint of amusement or pleasure did it bring me. Does that mean I hated it? No, of course not. It's only a movie. It just used up some of my time, not such a precious commodity since retiring, but I would imagine it would irritate some other viewers.
Director Paul Feig has spent most of his career doing stuff for TV, and it shows. "Unaccompanied Minors" feels like a slightly expanded sitcom and has everything but a laugh track to announce where the jokes are supposed to be. A laugh track might have helped; I dunno.
The movie is unfunny from the opening scenes, where we see a dad and his son fainting at the sight of a department-store Santa, a girl thinking a Santa is "hot," and a yet another little girl punching a Santa in the stomach. Well, if nothing else, these scenes prepare us for the quality of the humor to come.
It's the Christmas season at a big metropolitan airport, and a variety of kids are flying off by themselves for sundry destinations. The airlines designate such passengers "unaccompanied minors." Then a storm hits the area, and the airport gets snowed in. No flights in or out. The snowstorm grounds all the passengers. So, what does the airport's head of passenger relations, Oliver Porter (Lewis Black), do with all the unaccompanied youngsters? He herds them up and locks them in the "Unaccompanied Minors Room," a black hole in the airport basement where the children go nuts, running amok, kicking, fighting, screaming, and burping for no particular reason.
The kids in the film behave badly. The adults behave worse.
Every child is an exaggerated stereotype, from the snob to the nerd to the klutz to the loser. If I were a kid, I'd sue the scriptwriters. But they're not as bad as the adults, who are total idiots, starting with Black's character, who is obnoxious in the extreme.
Ah, but kids are creative and have minds of their own, at least of few of them. Early on, a group of five youngsters escape from this dungeon, and the rest the film is a chase, with airport security frantically trying to track down the missing children. The five kids are Charlie Goldfinch (Tyler Jones Williams), a black Jewish lad who flies unaccompanied quite a lot; Timothy "Beef" Wellington (Brett Kelly), an extra-large, quiet boy; Grace Conrad (Gina Mantegna), a spoiled rich girl; Donna Malone (Quinn Shepherd), an eleven-year-old with attitude; and Spencer Davenport (Dyllan Christopher), described as a "dorky kid from the AV squad" by a gathering of girls, yet who is very cute and very charming; go figure. He becomes the movie's central character, so I guess it's important that he be sort of an outcast but not an entirely unappealing one.
As I've said, there was not a single thing in the film I found amusing, unless you consider peeing, belching, punching, and yelling amusing. The movie starts out bad and gets worse. Most of the jokes are cringe-inducing, and until near the end of the movie, most of the kids are bratty.
Think of an unfunny "Home Alone" combined with a thoughtless, preteen version of "The Breakfast Club." I mean, what are we to think of children who outwardly appear normal going crazy in an unclaimed baggage area? Or people of all ages doing ridiculously stupid things like trying to drive a bio-diesel automobile across country in a blizzard?
