Martin Lawrence sells out the last vestiges of his Bad Boys goodwill in a shockingly inept family road trip comedy.
But it forgets to pack a single laugh, drowning in treacle-thick sentiment and shameful mugging.
This is a frontrunner for worst film of the year, but a healthy $45m in the US means a sequel is likely – proof that education standards are indeed slipping.
Will Smith’s sidekick is Jim Porter, a control-freak police chief wanting to keep his daughter Melanie (Disney central casting star and exec-producer Raven-Symone) from flying the nest by scuppering her attempts to study Law at Georgetown University.
On an (over)long trip, Jim (and the audience) will be forced to contend with a science geek son and his pet pig, comical gangsters, and the dawning realisation that his little girl doesn’t need daddy no more.
If loud was funny this would beat Airplane! on the gags-per-minute scale but, like mistaking volume for humour, everything here is misjudged.
Lawrence has an uncomfortably vast Capturing the Friedman’s style video collection of Melanie’s entire life (but nothing for his son), and breaks into her friend's dorm to see if Mel is shacking up with boys.
The big question throughout is why would Jim want to keep this screeching, ungrateful bipolar monstrosity, first seen in a high school mock trial getting the Big Bad Wolf acquitted on a technicality?
Any self-respecting rubbish movie would stop at a family pig causing food-throwing chaos during a mobster’s wedding, a gay GPS stranding Jim and co in the middle of nowhere, and rap karaoke with comedy Japanese tourists.
But College Road Trip makes room for Donny Osmond (yes, really) and another central casting test-tube actress as a father and daughter show-tune singing duo, ripping off of the immeasurably superior The Sure Thing.
A script credited to four writers lifts the plot of Road Trip and replaces smut with schmaltz, while director Roger Kumble (visionary auteur behind The Sweetest Thing and Just Friends) hasn’t got the smarts to jump-start this stalled star vehicle.
3rd class degrees all round and no place at graduation.
Rob Daniel
1:33PM, Jan 06, 2009
