Ice Cube's career began on an explosive high with his groundbreaking performance as Doughboy in Boyz N the Hood. That career is at great risk 15 years later with stinkers such as Anaconda, Torque, and now the newest addition to the family, the miserable feature Are We There Yet?. The project is full of so many contrived elements and is so dreary to suffer through, it becomes almost impossible to recall a time when Ice Cube conceivably represented a new generation of gritty and talented actors.
Are We There Yet? tells the story of Nick (Cube), a lonely owner of a sports card shop. Nick loves the ladies but doesn't love children, which puts a pinch on his plans to land a striking business woman who works across the street (Suzanne, a mother, played by Nia Long). When Suzanne's ex-husband bails on their plans to look after her bratty kids Lindsay (Aleisha Allen) and Kevin (Philip Bolden) for New Year's, while she is at some kind of work function in Vancouver(!), Nice Guy Nick offers to take the kids to Vancouver himself by buying a ticket and boarding the airplane with them. In one of the movie's many stupid plotholes, Nick and the children are thrown out of the airport for setting off one of the metal detectors, and the three of them are apparently not allowed to book a flight ever again.
Thus begins a series of thwarted attempts to get the kids to their mother on time for New Year's. Nick's new product placement unit, a Lincoln Navigator, gets damaged beyond recognition during the adventure. Soon the children, pranksters through and through (in the opening, they torture one of their mother's suitors à la Home Alone), board a train and Nick mounts a steed, chasing after them on horseback. There are pee-pee mishaps in a gas station bathroom, God-awful karaoke diversions at a birthday party which the trio helpfully crashes, and even a bizarre fistfight with a sadistic deer. Did I mention that little Kevin has asthma, and there are not one, but several moments when Nick has to rush about like a madman to get Kevin his puffer refill?
The film suffers the same problem that most idiot comedies seem to have. All of the characters say exactly what they are supposed to; not because it is motivated by something inside them, but rather because they need to telegraph a tired joke a few minutes down the road. By the end of the movie, when Nick says that he loves the two kids, we wonder why on earth he would say something like that, why Suzanne would be so willing believe all of the stupid things she does, and why the children are not disciplined to the point where they are not allowed to surface from their rooms again until the year 2012.
Why in the world a movie such as Are We There Yet? required four writers is beyond me, since I only laughed once, and even that was partly based on the surprise of having found myself laughing at something -- anything at all -- in the first place. It just goes to show that more input from more sources does not necessarily equate a good script. The director is Brian Levant, whose distinguished roster includes Snow Dogs, Jingle All the Way, a Problem Child sequel and the two Flintstones movies. This guy makes Ed Wood look like Billy Wilder.
It is at this point I will mention that Lieutenant Uhura herself, Nichelle Nichols, is in this motion picture as a grandmother who farts in her sleep. There is also a Chinese auto mechanic with an extremely thick accent that is bought off with a rare sports card that Nick happens to have in his pocket. And little Kevin pukes all over Nick's SUV. Are We Laughing Yet? I read a tagline on the Internet Movie Data Base that proclaimed this movie was even funnier than Christmas with the Kranks. I guess you gotta start somewhere.
