brianna@sfreporter.com
With all the seriousness one can muster and without a hint of sarcasm, I will tell you that Disney’s Cheaper By The Dozen reboot/remake is one of the worst movies I have ever seen. To say it sucks would be to insult air itself; whatever promise Disney+ may have had in original programming is not only eviscerated, it’s a reminder to keep this service at the top of your streaming service cost-cutting list.
In its first major fault, the Baker family has nine kids—not the dozen the title promises in a seeming attack against the entire premise of the original 1948 Frank Bunker Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey memoir from which these repeated films are inspired. Nine! In a never-ending setup, Paul (Zach Braff, who ought to be criminally prosecuted for this role) invents a special sauce out of his family-run breakfast café where he and wife Zoë (Gabrielle Union) use their children as forced labor. The sauce makes the multi-racial fam a fortune, so they move to a wealthy Los Angeles enclave where questions of systemic racism living authentically come into play. There are antics in-between, but it feels the length of a Lord of the Rings extended edition marathon.
Is Cheaper By the Dozen a parody of the online left’s checklist for diversity points, or an honest attempt at something wholesome? It doesn’t matter. It is a filthy movie not because of its aspirations, but because of its dark, seething underbelly. Expect jokes made at the expense of people who go to trade schools, attend therapy and towards gay people (oh don’t worry, Disney remembered not to include them in this diversity training video). Expect elitist trash proclaiming to be democratic while admonishing corporate practices only to start flooding the screen with astonishing product placement. Every other minute a corporate brand flies across the screen.
It’s like a 57 year old man studied modern teen culture in rigorous forms of scholarship without ever meeting one. The characters are not human, they are formless blobs. Its worst offense is the pretense that racism exists as a unique trend to high-income communities and not where the “real people” live. You can’t make a project so obsessed with social justice when no one in the project actually believes in what they are saying—or when the studio doesn’t bother for an attempt at quality. We know Disney is a corporate crash grab company, but rarely have they pumped out such a disgusting attempt at generating good PR and, thus, subscribers. Even the firm believers in film preservation should consider this version of Cheaper By The Dozen worthy of destruction.
1
+Literally nothing.
-Literally everything.
Cheaper By The Dozen
Directed by Gail Lerner
With Braff, Union and Timon Kyle Durrett
Disney+, NR, 107 min
