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Shelf Beauties |
Are We Done Yet? An animated Ice
Cube greets the audience in the opening credit sequence, but
that’s the last
time you will see an energetic and engaging Ice Cube for the rest of
the
movie. Ice Cube is back
as Nick – the sports memorabilia shop owner from Are We There
Yet. Now, he has
married Suzanne (Nia Long), moved
the whole family into his apartment (Didn’t she have a big
house in the first
movie? Why not live
there?), sold the
shop, and is in the process of starting his own sports magazine. Of course, the apartment
is proving to be too
small for the family of four, and some big news makes it even more
apparent it
is time to buy a house. Nick
and the
family find their beautiful dream house out in the How bad is
it? Can Nick and
the family handle the
stress of fixing the place up? Based on the
Cary Grant movie, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, even the ghost
of Cary
Grant might want to consider a lawsuit against the people who
perpetrated this
flat, lifeless comedy on the world and tied his name to it so
prominently. Ice
Cube is the
biggest problem. He’s
trying so
hard to look cool and tough that he doesn’t give himself over
enough to the
comedy. Is Ice Cube
trying to keep cool
out of fear of melting away? He
needs to
be a man losing control, flummoxed by the events around him and
immersing
himself into the craziness of the comedy.
When performing Straight Outta Compton, you might be
worried about
looking idiotic, but you can’t be afraid of looking silly in
a comedy. It’s
not a completely horrible performance, but
one that needs more help, and shows me he would be better off in a more
subtle,
smoother comedy, instead of one like this that calls for broader
acting. The result is a
movie with much forced silliness and slapstick.
Director Steve Carr and writer Hank Nelken
don’t build to anything.
They just let most jokes happen without
structure or basis hoping a pratfall will be enough to entertain the
audience. They have
some funny running jokes, like an
extension from the first movie about how everything in nature hates
Nick, but
that’s about as deep and planned as the movie gets. Are We Done Yet?
is a movie made mediocre or mildly passable by John C. McGinley, who
plays
Chuck Mitchell, Jr. – the town’s Mr. Everything who
buddies up to the
family. While Carr
and Nelken ruin his
storyline with a weak attempt at sentimentality we have seen in other
movies
before (and done much better), McGinley puts in a yeoman’s
effort to liven up
the proceedings, and has a strange chemistry with Ice Cube that almost
works. Are We Done Yet? is not an offensively bad movie, and you will laugh at some stuff, but
it leaves
you asking why anyone would care to make it, or rush out to see it. 1 ½ Waffles (Out Of 4) Are We Done Yet? is rated PG for some innuendos and brief language
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