Insipid

Rating: 1/10 (22 January 2007)

Wow.
I'm stunned.
Every once in a while a movie comes along that is jaw-droppingly horrible to the point that it leaves your mouth hanging open. I lack sufficient terms to express how trite and repellent I find this simpering movie. It's an exhausted "human spirit" movie so cloying that it needs to be taken off life support. From the first time I saw the TV commercial which featured the hackneyed ruse of getting the whole family in one vehicle for the duration of a movie, I suspected the script would have difficulty making that premise believable. It certainly fails there, but that's the least of its problems. But still, the wealth of good reviews drew me to buy a ticket. My initial reservations were right. This script is an inept piece of garbage long before you evaluate it on moral grounds, where it collapses spectacularly.
The family here is a mix of characters so drippy and dense that they never realize their dumpy, uncoordinated, bespectacled daughter isn't the Junior Miss type. It takes them exactly one pageant (following a needless cross country trip) to figure that out. The same family doesn't realize that a heroin-snorting, horndog grandfather shouldn't be the one teaching their adolescent daughter her beauty pageant dance number. Why not go all the way and include a "funny scene" of grampa molesting her? The setup is practically there; a scene so distasteful feels like it's just off-screen (or on the cutting room floor) in this wholly objectionable movie.
Long after a ridiculously unbelievable "chance meeting" in a gas station, long after paper-deep villains have been thrown at the screen, long after the annoying Murphy's Law plot line is exhausted, comes the most sick, saccharine, crappy moment in all of film history which involves a family attempting to redeem their seven-year old daughters failed, inappropriate talent routine (a strip tease) by joining her on stage. Sexualizing a seven year old girl without her being developmentally able to understand it... mmm, that's comedy gold. This "edgy material" is about as palatable as a cup of bleach.
I'm not one to look for messages but here we've got something like "Let's all support each other as we swim up the cr*p river of life!"
I'm sure it's supporters think I've missed the point and that the humor is just dark. It's not dark. Making a dark comedy is an art. This comedy has no edge in it's delivery. It's filmed straight. It's acted and presented ineptly. It's about as edgy as a smutty episode of Seventh Heaven. This is the rotten family-values homily to end them all. Drawing big saccharine payoffs to support a family values theme also places this squarely in mainstream whitebread entertainment.
It makes perfect sense that idiotic Hollywood would nominate this tripe for a bunch of Oscars, but I can't believe I respect people who like this atrocity. The Oscars have become so gratingly self-impressed, and the nominees so limp, that all you can really do anymore is root against films you don't want to have any further influence on the culture. I am so glad it lost the Best Picture award last night; Today it starts a long descent to the bottom of time's toilet, exactly where it belongs, where it will be forgotten.