Review of RV (2006) by Markb. — 04 Jun 2006

Robin Williams (more or less playing it straight, with one regrettable lapse in which he proves that, Eminem and The Beastie Boys notwithstanding, White men really SHOULDN'T rap) [***SPOILERS***] plays Bob Munro, a businessman, husband and father who attempts to combine work with play by taking the wife and kids on a cross-country trip to try to sell a mom-and-pop soft drink company on becoming one more acquisition of the global megaconcern he works for.

While the conglomerate's business practices and goals are certainly questionable at best, Munro is a rather decent, hardworking and well-meaning fellow attempting to do the best he can for his family.

In this movie's peculiar moral universe, he is rewarded by being drenched with a geyser of liquid poo. (Isn't it supposed to be a basic principle of comedy to have the rich and powerful be the victims of pratfalls, not the little guy? Oh, sorry, I forgot.

..this is a Barry Sonnenfeld film, not a Chaplin one. My mistake.) RV cerainly calls up echoes of the 1950s Lucy-Desi farce The Long, Long Trailer and the original National Lampoon's Vacation (especially the latter's last 30 minutes, which are almost totally laugh-free) but I found myself being reminded equally as often of the very strange and unpleasant 1992 comedy Folks!, in which nice guy Tom Selleck suffers endless physical, emotional and financial embarrassments and worse trying to protect his frail, senile dad.

Despite a rather refreshing subplot involving a brood of overly friendly fellow travelers headed by Jeff Daniels that pleasingly dispels some common initial stereotypes on both Munro's and the audience's part, RV is a real chore to watch because Williams' wife and daughter are so relentlessly whiny, ungrateful and obnoxious (despite their predictable, arbitrary and clumsily-written eleventh-hour turnaround) that I felt as though I was stuck in the RV with them, too.

Your enjoyment or lack thereof of this movie will therefore depend a great deal on what cable channel you like to watch most often: if your favorite is Nickelodeon, the subtext will mean nothing to you, so enjoy the liquid poo and have a ball! If it's Lifetime, perhaps watching this will help you to understand that it's NOT always the guy who's at fault.

And if your channel of choice is SpikeTV, then you'll find it very hard to blame our protagonist if he, midway through the trip, strands the whole sorry brood by the side of the road to fly off to Hawaii with a nubile hitchhiker he picks up who could pass for his granddaughter, even if she does eventually ditch him for a fire dancer, siphons off every cent he's got and leaves him completely penniless and destitute to live out his days in a triler just a few yards away from Ennis Del Mar's.