Review: Yours, Mine and Ours

Right now, Raja Gosnell’s career is the bane of most sensible parents’ multiplex existence.

Yours, Mine and Ours
Photo: Paramount Pictures

Right now, Raja Gosnell’s career is the bane of most sensible parents’ multiplex existence. But the family film oeuvre-cum-abattoir of this Hollywood hack (who didn’t even have the “with it” perspicacity to title his follow-up to the dire CGI Mystery Machine clan Scooby-Doo 2: Electric Scoobaloo) will someday provide some enterprising experimental filmmaker with a sick sense of humor plenty of material for an assaultive short. In this hypothetical film, a crew of respectable, talented Hollywood B-listers will find themselves trapped in a series of harshly-lit, awkwardly elongated reaction shots in which the only emotion they can summon is a slack-jawed revulsion at either some horrible, scatological occurrence off-screen or their own newly degraded résumés. Yours, Mine and Ours, stocked with enough Nickelodeon-owned kid stars to qualify as the public result of an intensive, mandatory summer acting camp, should provide this avant-garde novelty mash-up with its put-upon leading lady: Rene Russo, who plays a Stepford-upon-Evion fashionista widow to Dennis Quaid’s growling Admiral widower. High school sweethearts of yore, both of them have enough kids to run a sweatshop. So they swiftly consolidate their families and double their taxable dependents, disregarding the fact that the two diametric clans—one straight-laced, the other humorlessly hipster (the baby-emo guitarist Drake Bell is presumptuously cast as the leader of the latter group)—will soon be violently comparing “to-may-toe” with “to-mah-toe,” both usually ending up drizzling down Quaid’s awaiting visage. A remake of a late-’60s Lucille Ball-Henry Fonda vehicle which could’ve been read as a Love Generation commercial for birth control, the New World Order-era remake’s crass bid to one-up the new Cheaper By the Dozen reverses the message, unmistakably suggesting that, in Team America, the worth of a family forms a direct correlation with the number of kamikaze sperms swimming around in Daddy’s ball-sac.

Score: 
 Cast: Dennis Quaid, Rene Russo, Sean Faris, Katija Pevec, Dean Collins, Tyler Patrick Jones, Haley Ramm, Brecken Palmer, Bridger Palmer, Ty Panitz, Danielle Panabaker, Drake Bell, Miki Ishikawa, Slade Pearce, Lil' JJ, Miranda Cosgrove, Andrew Vo, Jennifer Habib. Jessica Habib, Nicholas Roget-King, Rip Torn, Linda Hunt, Jerry O'Connell  Director: Raja Gosnell  Screenwriter: Ron Burch, David Kidd  Distributor: Paramount Pictures  Running Time: 90 min  Rating: PG  Year: 2005  Buy: Video

Eric Henderson

Eric Henderson is the web content manager for WCCO-TV. His writing has also appeared in City Pages.

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