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.
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