Are
We There Yet, might have been more appropriately entitled “Is It Over Yet?”
In fact I’d probably feel sorry for Ice Cube for having been wrangled into
taking part in this ex-rapper-on-the-road pile-up, had I not noticed his name
in the production credits. Showing evidence that “Amerikkka’s Most Wanted”
was complicit in this attempt to turn the Erstwhile XXX action-star into America’s
Most Cuddly.
In
this Johnson Family Vacation-caliber debacle, Ice plays Nick Persons, a player
(whose credo includes an abject distaste for the shorties) who drives a pimped-out
Navigator designed exclusively to attract the opposite sex so that he might have
plenty of it. His latest conquest (Nia Long) unfortunately comes complete with
the kind of baggage that Nick would prefer to strap to the roof of his beloved
ride. Hence the table is set for Nick to get a healthy dose of comeuppance and
for the rest of us to wish we’d waited in the car ourselves.
Early
on in his courtship of Long, Ice Cube is pressed into service when an emergency
dictates that he must drive her children (11-year-old Lindsay played by Aleisha
Allen, who was so charming in School of Rock, and a much younger Philip Daniel
Bolden) from Oregon to Vancouver so they can be safely re-united with their mother.
This formula for disaster, could well have been an entertaining road movie, but
what transpires is a painfully un-funny and surprisingly mean-spirited exercise
in bad film making.
For
their part, the children are motivated to make any new man in their mother’s
life a living hell, because they believe that the separation of their parents
is temporary. We find out, however, that the kid’s real father has already
settled into a new romance, that comes complete with a whole new family. He’s
not going to be coming back, but this is a detail that their mother has yet to
confess in any way. Thus, their efforts to protect their parents marriage from
any and all threats, is sincere, however misguided and ultimately as doomed as
this really, really bad excuse for a family film.
Right
away I deeply regretted bringing my similarly aged children with me to see Are
We There Yet? because the children in this film are depicted as shameless and
unrepentant brats. The gags and pratfalls that they subject Ice to are so sadistic
(think Home Alone) that the film caused me to wince throughout for a host of reasons.
In Home Alone the violence unleashed on Stern and Pesci was easy to swallow because
they were bad guys trying burglarize the home or worse. In Are We There Yet, we
get the same sort of exaggerated violence, but it is meted out against an innocent
who is merely trying to help. A fact that not only detracts heavily from the film,
but is also a terrible message for the kids in the audience of this (PG) rated
family film.
Along
with the thorough thrashing both Ice Cube and his Navigator are handed, is the
unquestionable damage this may well bring to bear on his career. Cube had seemed
almost bullet-proof, when you consider his Friday and Barbershop franchises, not
to mention his Player’s Club project and his musical career. Are We There
Yet, will fast be forgotten as a really lousy movie and with any luck Ice Cube
will be able to soldier ahead and shrug it off as minor battle lost on his way
to winning the war.
