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by Willie Waffle

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Yours, Mine and Ours

This year's annual Thanksgiving Turkey Award goes to Yours, Mine and Ours for being the worst movie opening Thanksgiving weekend. Yours, Mine and Ours is so bad you might not legally be allowed to call it a movie.

Dennis Quaid, paying off some odd and sadistic debt to the devil, portrays Frank Beardsley - a widowed Admiral in the US Coast Guard who has come to Connecticut to run the Coast Guard Academy. He runs a tight ship and expects his 8 kids to go along with the rules and schedules he lays out, which they do with pride. Joining Quaid on this painful journey is Rene Russo playing Helen North - a widowed designer with 10 kids (I hope both actors received VERY large paychecks and bought VERY nice new homes with the money).

Whereas Frank's house is run with military precision, Helen's is a madhouse of creativity, messiness and loud noise. The two used to date seriously in high school, so sparks fly again when they meet up at their 25th high school reunion. When they decide to get married, it leads to utter chaos as their 18 kids try to cope with a new living situation, new brothers and sisters, and new expectations.

Will the kids all get along? Can Frank and Helen find a way to make it work? Will the kids' evil plot to break up the parents succeed? Have I talked you out of seeing the movie yet?

Yours, Mine and Ours is the Brady Bunch on steroids with scene after scene of kids screaming and causing mayhem, which is what you and I are trying to get away from on Thanksgiving Day when we go to the movies (the kiddie table at every Thanksgiving feast eventually turns into a Lord of the Flies situation, and only the strong can survive by escaping). Instead of trying to develop individual personalities and plots for the kids, 4 writers and director Raja Gosnell decide to go for painful, repetitive and ridiculous physical humor time and time again. It's a very simple formula consisting of small dialogue between Russo and Quaid, leading to a family outing, which turns into a disaster, which makes the kids scream, and gets topped off with someone (usually Quaid) having something dumped on him to end the scene. After 4 or 5 of these sequences, I was ready for some aspirin.

Sadly, Gosnell seems to add a new family pet in every scene, which is a horrible admission that he didn't think the kids were cute enough and had to call in the 4-legged reinforcements. You'll be surprised to find out the pet pig is in as many scenes as Quaid and Russo as the director tries to get laughs from him like director Adam Shankman attempted to get laughs out of the duck in Vin Diesel's The Pacifier (I guess the Pig and the Duck have the same agent.).

Some moments between Russo and Quaid are nice because they are the few scenes with dialogue and heart, but none of the kids, aside from a much-too-talented-for-this-garbage Danielle Panabaker, have any iota of charm, especially Sean Faris, who plays the oldest Beardsley kid. I hope he's learning how to direct, because his acting skills won't give him a career as his looks fade and his hair falls out (Personally, I'm hoping that happens before he signs up for another movie).

I don't want this movie to be yours, mine or ours.

-1 Waffle (Out Of 4)

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