Back in 2013 when I first started out on this kick of
watching any new film I could get my hands on, I for some reason decided to
watch a little film called Diary Of A Wimpy Kid: Dog Days. Aside from being yet
another kids film that doesn’t have much value for adult audiences, it is also
one of the biggest examples of White People Problems I’ve yet encountered in a
modern release. Yeah, bit rich coming from someone who is white himself, but
the air of privilege and minor inconvenience that so permeated the entire film
can’t really be summed in any other way. That film was meant to be the final instalment in a trilogy, and since none of the other films fit my purview, I
considered that series closed up for business and something I wouldn’t have to
bother myself with again.
Then the trailers and posters for today’s film
started surfacing and I went all Michael Corleone from Godfather III: “Just
when I thought I was out, they pull me back in”. The sooner I get this over and
done with, the sooner I can pull myself back out again, so let’s take a look at
this latest installment and see how, somehow, it’s even worse than what came before it.
The plot: To celebrate her great-grandmother’s 90th
birthday, Greg (Jason Drucker), his brothers Rodrick (Charlie Wright) and Manny
(Wyatt and Dylan Walters), and his parents Susan (Alicia Silverstone) and Frank
(Tom Everett Scott) are going on a road trip to their great-grandmother’s
house. Desperately-trying-to-be-a-meme-hijinks ensue.
It is actually painful to see these actors participating in
this story, and it’s not even out of any real attachment to the actors; I can
count all of one person I recognize and yet I still think these actors deserve
better. Drucker is okay as our lead, handling his status as the only
logical-thinking member of the family quite well and managing to leave at least
some dignity in this thing. Wright as
his brother is amazingly obnoxious, gurning his face to within an inch of its
life in most scenes and generally coming across as the bullying older brother
caricature that we have seen many, many, MANY times before. Doesn’t help
that he looks like the home brand version of Justin Long.
Scott as the father
is decent, managing to balance out the inanity that surrounds him better than I
was ever expecting, and a surprisingly-unrecognisable Silverstone… oh dear.
Along with being another caricature trying desperately to relate to real-life,
her impossible shrillness ends up burying the very Clark Griswold “We are going
to have fun, goddammit!” attitude at the heart of her character. That said, she
is exceptionally good at delivering premium Mom guilt, to the point of being
scarily real. Trust me, that’s the closest this film ever gets to something
like quantifiable reality.
I don’t think I have audibly groaned this much while
watching a movie in a long-ass time. I know that comedy is a subjective thing
and that outright saying “this is not funny” is kind of pointless, but there is a definite method to humour, what
works and what doesn’t. Punchlines tend to work best the less you’re able to
see them coming; the surprise is part of the initial emotional reaction, which
leads to laughter. By that basis, this film is objectively unfunny. I say that because
it is insane how many of the jokes are telegraphed well in advance, sometimes
at least half an hour in advance, and then the punchline lands to the sound of
crickets. Add to that the bodily function gags that are at least a decade old
by this point and the attempts at cringe comedy that only succeed in the
former, and you have a pretty lame bedrock for a film that is meant to
primarily be about comedy.
And no, “it’s just for kids” isn’t good enough to
excuse this. As much as children are easily distracted by certain things, kids
are actually a lot smarter than most filmmakers give them credit for. If
younger audiences end up questioning common sense during Alvin & The
Chipmunks (check here for that story, because I still think that kid is made of
awesome), I highly doubt that they’re going to accept this without getting
bored and begging to leave the cinema or, in a more preferable situation,
begging to watch something else. Besides, if parents are the main people going
with kids to these movies, does it make too much sense to try and engage them
too so long as they’re here? Unless you’re really nostalgic for the Spice
Girls, I doubt that’s going to happen either. Although, to be fair, the call-back
to that gag near the end is actually kind of sweet.
I mentioned Clark Griswold earlier, and honestly, the only
other film I can compare this to is the 2015 remake of Vacation; this might be
the single most damning thing I could say about any movie, bear in mind. Like Vacation, it’s a road trip movie
meant to be taken piece-by-piece rather than as a whole, with each pit stop
serving as its own punchline that the film stacks up together. Also like
Vacation, the surreality of said pit stops really ends up damaging any attempt
to be ‘relatable’. I denounced the previous Wimpy Kid film for just being ‘Rich
White People Problems: The Movie’, and yet even that is preferable to this. Coming off of the heels of Cars 3
probably affected my mind state somewhat, but I’m not exactly laughing at the
mockery of the American lower-class with this one; taking a literal neckbeard
from understandably annoyed to “let’s steal this other family’s stuff” isn’t
what I would call “funny” or “something I should be seeing in 20-fucking-17”.
Beyond that idiocy of a comedic foil, the idea of turning kid-centric
dysfunction into a near-literal cartoon is okay but, as has been shown earlier
this year with Middle School, it doesn’t seem like people know how to do this
properly. As a result, when the family ends up adopting a pig by pure chance or
being attacked by hideously-CGI birds, I can’t really say that I find something
relatable about these situations. I grew up a white suburbanite; I should be
able to see something of myself in this if it’s being this broad, right?
Well, we get dangerously close to exactly that once we get
into Greg’s Internet subplot. For reasons that genuinely looked like a dream
sequence but weren’t, Greg ends up as an Internet meme with him waving a used
diaper around. I don’t know why I keep coming across this but, seriously, can
we get people to understand what the term “viral” actually means? By this
film’s definition, my review for Sir Noface has gone “viral”; I don’t see a lot
of people showing inordinate lenience towards ghost-hunting in response, even
for a joke. Once we get to the biggest running gag of the entire film,
consisting mainly of people watching and re-enacting ‘Diaper Hands’ throughout
the trip, you start to realise how desperate this film truly is to get a laugh.
Maybe it’s because I’ve seen way too many try-hards on YouTube try to get
famous through similar means, but I don’t buy it.
Then Greg ends up in a gaming
convention and I wound up turning into
Greg with how I finally felt at home in this sort of situation. Hell, the
inclusion of Mac Digby (Joshua Hoover), a Let’s Player, is weirdly progressive and
shows that the writers here have at least some awareness of web culture. Not
that that lasts for long, though, as it quickly gets intercepted by the same
tired gags spoken by tired archetypes that ends up tiring the audience.
Honestly, the best thing I can say about this film is that at least it isn’t
Nerve-levels of misunderstanding modern technology. The ‘limited screen time’
rule of the road trip does feel realistic, and it even features reasonable,
non-kiddified arguments both for and against it. Have to admit, I have some
respect for that as a person who might as well be surgically attached to his
own laptop.
All in all, while there are elements of this film that I can
give some props for, and part of me gets a kick out of the old-school film
references that show up every so often, this is yet another pointless and
excruciatingly unfunny road trip movie. The comedy is so broad that I highly
doubt it will appeal to anyone, even
kids, the set pieces are incredibly lame and don’t even work on live-action
cartoon logic, and while I can’t fault the actors too much given the
‘characters’ they have to work with, they’re not exactly breaking their backs
to make them any more palatable.
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