Cute, but for me it was only moderately amusing and only moderately interesting

Rating: 5/10 (14 November 2014)

Little Miss Sunshine focuses on a dysfunctional family who undertake a journey to Redondo beach in California so that their 7 year old daughter Olive (Abigail Breslin)can compete in a beauty pageant.
Predictably, this being a 'road trip' film, essentially many things go wrong along the way; some things that occur on this journey were funny and some things weren't and that was a big problem with this film; it's essentially a 'comedy drama', but due to wildly uneven writing it's not really entirely successful as either a comedy or a drama. Many of the characters are quite thin cardboard cut out types (particularly the mother and father) who were very clichéd and annoying. Alan Arkin was funny as Grandpa Hoover and he does get some of the best lines, but I must admit that even his character started to wear thin after a while - his character's demise was sad, but smuggling his corpse out of the hospital and carting it around in their people carrier was probably one of the funnier moments in the film. Steve Carrell's character was also a bit of a disappointment; we're told that he's attempted suicide because the man he loved went off with someone else, but aside from the early scenes at the family home he just seemed to be a normal guy - it's almost like his suicidal nature has been forgotten. Even when he meets the man he loved in a service station (he randomly meets him in an area that he doesn't live anywhere near), he still doesn't really show as much emotion as I was expecting. Considering he was hospitalised for his suicidal tendencies I thought that he may have got a bit more upset.
Far and away, the most interesting character in the film was Dwayne (played by the excellent Paul Dano). His character is by far the most interesting and although he's singled out as being a bit odd, he's probably the most sane person in the family. The scene where it's revealed that he's colour blind and therefore can't join the air force really hit home with me and this scene really shows how much joining the air force meant to Dwayne. Not only was this scene well acted by Dano, but it was also a good bit of writing. It's just a shame that as a whole the film was so inconsistent.
LMS as a whole is an uneven and inconsistent film and I found that when it got things right it was really good, but unfortunately I didn't find a lot of the gags to be funny and I also felt that it didn't entirely work as a drama, mainly because some of the characters were either thinly written or unlikeable which meant I couldn't emotionally invest in some of the characters (the only characters I actually liked were Dwayne and Frank). It's not bad, but it's hardly 'award winning' either.