Review of Cheaper by the Dozen 2 (2005) by Gareth R — 02 Feb 2009

They're back, even though nobody missed them.

The next adventure for the Baker family is a holiday. It might be their last one together as a unit because, inevitably, they're growing apart. The youngest kids are growing up, the eldest want to move away. (Improbably, there don't seem to be any teenagers, unless they're saving all the misery, moaning and acne for Cheaper 3.) None of it's original or terribly interesting; surely we got all the overbearing father/ungrateful children stuff out of the way in the first film? Alas, you know just where Cheaper By The Dozen 2 is going, and it takes ages to get there.

What's different is that this film has an antagonist: Jimmy Murtaugh (Eugene Levy), an insufferable show-off who also has a large family and wants to rub Tom's (Steve Martin) face in their obvious superiority. Levy is a comic actor, and should have done wonders with this fairly obvious bad guy role. Instead Murtaugh is an annoyingly dull and repetitious menace, whose reasons for wanting Baker to feel bad are - need you ask - nothing but juvenile. (It says a lot that his wife, played by actress-of-questionable-talent Carmen Electra, is more diverting than he is.) When he rightly accuses Tom's children of being rowdy screw-ups, Tom points out that Jimmy's kids are repressed and unhappy. The script, just like Tom, would rather change the subject, thank you very much.

The kids, of course, are causing all sorts of PG-rated havoc, usually involving the crazed dog (because it's not a family comedy without a horny/violent dog), falling over or fireworks. None of it's particularly funny, and some scenes - where an unwitting guy in a wheelchair gets hurt - are bizarrely mean. Tellingly, when the troublesome kid (Sarah) is asked to come up with another evil scheme like dousing Ashton Kutcher's pants in meat juice, she promptly comes up with a plan that is similar but far less inventive. Tired? This movie? Of course not!

Since the script once again only has room for three or four children, it's still worth asking why there are twelve of them. Charlie (Tom Welling, who appears to be at least ten years too old to still be hanging around with his gang of siblings) meets the eldest Murtaugh and falls in PG love, and wants to start a garage business. Lorraine (Hillary Duff) is starting work in New York. Laura (Piper Perabo) is having a baby with her new fiance. Sarah (Alyson Stoner) has started noticing boys. The rest, including two sets of twins, the bespectacled one, the fat one and assorted randoms, have to make do with crowd scenes. Bear in mind we have to also make room for Tom, who's behaving as badly as comedy father-figures tend to, often testing and upsetting his family in his quest to beat Jimmy Murtaugh. (They ultimately forgive him, even though he's asking for it.) Poor Steve Martin has probably done serious movies with funnier material than this: mugging lightly, he's unable to make this dull film stick in your mind once it's over. The (at least inoffensive) time drags by.

The best thing that can be said about it, like in the first one, is that it's not filled with the kind of balls-kicking, bodily-fluid-flinging grossness that seems to sell cinema tickets these days. There's a sort of genial likeability that doesn't appear in a lot of kids' films any more. (Maybe it's just Steve Martin.) But that doesn't change the flat, forgettable story or the overloaded and undernourished cast. This is another comedy that's not particularly funny, so unless you've got a really good reason, don't bother with it.