Daddy Day Camp
Movie Review
"Daddy Day Camp"
Review by Eric D. Snider
Grade: F
Rating: PG
Released: Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Directed by:
Cast:
If you've chosen to watch "Daddy Day Camp," I assume it is because you are a fan of two things: "Daddy Day Care," the 2003 film to which it is a sequel; and bodily functions. If you are indifferent toward those two things, then I cannot urge you in strong enough terms to avoid "Daddy Day Camp."
But if you do love those things, then boy howdy, are you ever in for a treat. "Daddy Day Camp" has a naked boy peeing into a toilet while scratching his butt, and a man accidentally eating a bug that was graphically smashed onto a barbecued hamburger patty, all before the opening credits are even finished! From there it is a long, messy ride through scene after scene of farting, peeing, vomiting, and pooping. The screenplay is attributed to three writers. That means if the film's funny parts were divided evenly among them, they each wrote zero.
The film answers the question "How bad does a sequel have to be for Eddie Murphy to want nothing to do with it?" He starred, with rotund comedian Jeff Garlin, in the 2003 family flick about two dads who start a daycare center. But neither man was interested in the sequel, so they've been replaced with Cuba Gooding Jr. and Paul Rae ... who are playing the same characters. Not the original characters' brothers, or two different characters in a similar situation, but the same characters. I guess the thinking was that as long as they had a Black Guy and a Fat White Guy, no one would notice the difference. They could just as easily have gotten Martin Lawrence and George Wendt, or Chris Tucker and James Gandolfini. (Actually, I would watch that movie.)
Gooding plays Charlie and Rae plays Phil, the guys whose daycare center, now in its fourth year, is wildly successful. They originally opened it to take care of their own young children; now those kids are 7 and getting ready to go to summer day camp.
Charlie has bad memories of his own camp days, as he lost a relay race in the inter-camp olympiad of 1977 and has evidently never healed from the emotional scars. That's right, Charlie is a great big baby. Nonetheless, his wife (Tamala Jones) says their son is going to camp, and that this shouldn't be news to Charlie, because the permission slip has been on the fridge for three weeks. Now it befalls Charlie and Phil to drive out to the woods to check out the place.
It's called Camp Driftwood, and it's a dilapidated old wreck. It's been closed for quite some time. You have to wonder, then, how the permission slip has been on the fridge for three weeks, because I don't think a camp that isn't operational would be sending out permission slips. Maybe it was a generic permission slip: "I give permission for my child to attend some camp at some point." At any rate, the owner (Brian Doyle-Murray), who evidently just sits in the camp's office all day every day even though the camp is closed, talks Charlie and Phil into becoming his business partners in order to get the place up and running again. Then he takes off and leaves it entirely in their hands. Then they find out the camp is on the verge of foreclosure -- which I think probably would have come up during the becoming-business-partners/looking-at-the-camp's-financial-status portion of the negotiations, but hey, what do I know. I've never even been to day camp, much less bought one.
So they have to get a lot of parents to start sending their kids to Driftwood in order to make enough money to keep it open. As if that weren't enough stress, they must also contend with neighboring Camp Canola, now owned by rich super-bastard Lance Warner (Lochlyn Munro) -- the very same Lance Warner who defeated Charlie in that race 30 years ago and who is still as much a jerk today as he was then!! What are the odds?!
Charlie and Phil's first day running the camp, with just one affable but incompetent counselor (Josh McLerran) to help, is a disaster, of course. We discover that while the camp has no functioning toilets, it does have a fully stocked snack bar in which all the candy is perfectly fresh despite having been boarded up for several years. (What the F?) We meet a boy who vomits all the time, more or less for no reason. (WTF?) Another kid has a mullet haircut and insists you call him "Mullet," which is more than you can say for most of the characters, who are never given names despite appearing in most of the film. (Whisky Tango Foxtrot?)
After that, only seven kids show up to camp each day, stalwarts whose parents don't care that their children are spending their summer days at a deathtrap. With Charlie and Phil's sons, that makes nine children total. But Charlie figures if they can beat Camp Canola at the annual inter-camp Olympics, it will give Camp Driftwood a great reputation and parents will start sending their kids to them again! That doesn't make any sense, of course -- why would parents care who wins a bunch of camp games? -- and Charlie's wife says so. Then, 30 seconds later, she changes her mind and is fully supportive of Charlie's stupid plan -- even though nothing has changed in those 30 seconds.
But how can he win the olympiad with a ragtag group of nine kids? For that, Charlie calls in his father, Col. Buck (Richard Gant), a tough military man from whom he has been estranged for quite some time. In fact, his father has been disappointed in him ever since ... why, ever since Charlie fell down and lost that race in 1977! That was one fateful day, I'll tell you, with repercussions that affect almost every aspect of Charlie's life even to this day.
Buck whips the kids into shape, people learn valuable life lessons, and there is much prankery back and forth between the two camps. Then the Olympics happen, and it's a curious set of games indeed: There are just the two camps involved, Canola's 50 kids up against Driftwood's nine.
The movie was directed by Fred Savage, the former star of "The Wonder Years" and now a frequent director of Disney Channel programming. I have nothing but fondness for "The Wonder Years," but holy crap is Fred Savage ever a pitiful director. This is putrid, insipid comedy at its worst. Nothing makes sense. The characters do things for no reason, and events occur without any apparent cause. The movie really is just a series of broad, lowbrow moments strung together randomly by a wisp of a plot.
In closing, let us discuss Cuba Gooding Jr. Almost immediately after he won that Oscar back in 1997, he launched a campaign to make the Academy sorry for it. He has been in some truly awful films since then. "Radio." "Boat Trip." "Snow Dogs." "Norbit." (Yes, he had a supporting role in that Eddie Murphy fiasco.) But say what you will about him, he knows his stuff: No living actor is better than Cuba Gooding Jr. at taking a bad film and making it completely unbearable. He's never seen a potentially comedic moment that he couldn't ruin with a little bug-eyed overacting. He jumps up and down, he screams like a woman, he sputters and fumes and hisses and stammers -- and none of it is funny. In a surprisingly bad movie, he is the most unsurprisingly bad thing about it.
Grade: F
Rated PG, lots and lots of bodily function jokes and other crude humor
1 hr., 33 min.
Copyright © Eric D. Snider.
This work may not be transmitted via the Internet, nor reproduced in any other way, without written consent from Eric D. Snider.
This item has 32 comments
August 8, 2007 at 6:40 am
I am confused by the last line of the review... a "surprisingly" bad movie? Huh? You surely didn't expect anything but!
August 8, 2007 at 6:47 am
On second thought you were probably referring to the degree of craptacularity. So nevermind.
August 8, 2007 at 7:55 am
For the record, Josh McLerran was my second-to-last mission companion, and is a very funny man. I hope he can get in some better movies.
August 8, 2007 at 9:39 am
I call these "White Trash/ Trailer Trash" niche' movies. There a huge market for these films in America, always has been and always will.
August 8, 2007 at 11:12 am
Corned_beef, um, I think that was suppose to be sarcasm...
August 8, 2007 at 12:08 pm
Sorry if I was unclear... It was no surprise the movie was bad; it was the degree of badness that was surprising. As in, even worse than you would have thought.
August 8, 2007 at 12:15 pm
Oh Cuba, what happened. Let us also not forget Rat Race, Pearl Harbor, and the movie that started the crappy slide - Chill Factor. Chill Factor may have caused this total career destruction.
Dont forget "Double-You Tee Eff"
August 8, 2007 at 1:46 pm
I saw the trailer for this in front of "Ratatouille" and immediately lost 30 I.Q. points.
August 8, 2007 at 5:58 pm
"He jumps up and down, he screams like a woman, he sputters and fumes and hisses and stammers"
Wasn't that his Oscar speech?
August 8, 2007 at 8:09 pm
This is one of the most hillarious reviews I have ever read, and now I will be bookmarking your page. My favorite line was the one that brought me over from rottentomatoes.
"The screenplay is attributed to three writers. That means if the film's funny parts were divided evenly among them, they each wrote zero."
Nice.
August 8, 2007 at 11:53 pm
That review was hilarious. I'm sure it was funnier than the entire movie. I sometimes go see bad movies just out of curiousity of how bad that they really are..........I think I will pass on this one.
August 9, 2007 at 1:52 am
Okay, Eric, I simply have to know: you are charged with choosing the worst comedy of 2007. The nominees are "Daddy Day Camp", "License to Wed", "Wild Hogs", "Norbit" and "Bratz" (not sure if that one was meant to be a comedy or not, but it makes it onto the ballot regardless).
The decision rests in your hands, Eric: which abomonation do you choose as the absolute worst of the year??
August 9, 2007 at 5:14 am
I would like to add to the nominees......... Epic Movie and Code Name: The Cleaner.
Out of the movies you mentioned, I've seen Wild Hogs and Norbit. As bad as they were, they are Oscar material compared to the January gems that I added to the list.
August 9, 2007 at 6:36 am
You'd think that moviie critics already rated "Daddy Day Care" pretty bad, and to stay away from a sequel(That's usually the message) But hey, they went ahead and did it anyway.
August 9, 2007 at 9:39 am
They also made a sequel to Baby Geniuses. Apparently there's a hard rule about this somewhere. Likely coming in 2010, "License to Divorce" and "Wilder Hogs". Both will still contain Robin Williams and Tim Allen, respectively.
I'm actually surprised the movie DOESN'T star Martin Lawrence and George Wendt.
August 9, 2007 at 9:58 am
"Whisky Tango Foxtrot?" is now my favorite new expression.
I mourn the Cuba Gooding Jr. That Could Have Been...
August 9, 2007 at 12:43 pm
i saw itand i thot it was kinda funny not as bad as u say thekid peeing made me laff hard
August 9, 2007 at 8:56 pm
I wish I had read the reviews before taking my kids to see this movie. This was hideous and not at all funny. For most of the movie, the theater was silent. The humor was so obvious and the acting was repulsive. Even my daughter, who is 7, didn't find it funny. Even though Daddy Day Care wasn't the best movie, it was more watchable than this.
August 10, 2007 at 9:19 am
I just heard an interview with Cuba Gooding, Jr. on the radio as a part of his publicity tour for this pile of a movie. He said the following guffaw-inducing line:
"'Daddy Day Camp' is a re-imagining of the franchise. We have more heart than the first film."
There are many things wrong with that sentence. "Franchise," "heart," and "film" would be my main objections.
August 10, 2007 at 12:51 pm
The Cuba Gooding Jr. Law states that if Cuba Gooding Jr. has a role in a film, it will suck. His power is such that, even if it is a minor supporting role (Pearl Harbor), the rest of the film will be lousy too. The only exception that I can think of was Zoolander, where his 5 second cameo seems to have left the film unharmed, although perhaps it caused the scene with Andy Dick.
August 10, 2007 at 1:55 pm
Cuba Gooding Jr. was in Zoolander?
August 10, 2007 at 5:34 pm
Doesn't the Cuba Gooding Jr. Law also apply to Halle Berry?
August 10, 2007 at 5:43 pm
This was the funniest movie review I have ever read. I love it!
August 10, 2007 at 10:07 pm
This review made me think of those quotes the preview ads always pull from critics' reviews to plug their movies - "A wildly-funny summer romp!" and what-not.
I think there were some great quotes that could be pulled from this review that sum up the movie, like "...holy crap is Fred Savage ever a pitiful director." and "The movie really is just a series of broad, lowbrow moments strung together randomly by a wisp of a plot."
Now that's advertising you'd stop and read. As for making you want to see the movie...hmmm...are there any cinematic masochists out there?
August 11, 2007 at 10:51 am
This was without a doubt the funniest movie review I have ever read, and you've instantly become my favorite movie reviewer. I sent the link to a bunch of people. I have never laughed out loud over a movie review til now.
I never had any intention of going to see Daddy Day Camp, but your review kind of makes me want to. No, I know, it's shameful.
August 11, 2007 at 5:56 pm
"That was one fateful day, I'll tell you, with repercussions that affect almost every aspect of Charlie's life even to this day."
That would explain why he's such a big crybaby about it then, wouldn't it?
August 13, 2007 at 1:57 am
I read a great piece of Cuba Gooding Jr in Pajiba last week, called "Hey Cuba, the Academy called. Guess What.."
http://www.pajiba.com/daddy-day-camp.htm
I have never seen Jerry McGuire so I don't know if he was really any good in that, but man, has he done some bad stuff just for the money.
August 14, 2007 at 11:08 am
your all kinda harsh dontu think its just a moive and it was kinda funny u cant say that the kid peeing didnt make u laff that was a riot i laffed hard there id see it againjust for that if thats what they show
August 15, 2007 at 4:28 pm
"The screenplay is attributed to three writers. That means if the film's funny parts were divided evenly among them, they each wrote zero." That was my favorite part.
August 26, 2007 at 11:10 am
I didn't think the movie was that great...Trys to follow in the footsteps of Daddy Day Care..Not that great
April 23, 2008 at 7:12 am
derek,
you spell it L A U G H.
January 4, 2009 at 8:26 am
I didnt think Cuba Gooding could outdo his own awfulness from RADIO - but I was proven wrong again.
By the way, your review for RADIO is still one of my very favorites. I had tears in my eyes from laughing so hard. Man did that movie ever blow.