Matt’s rating: 2.5/5 stars

I read somewhere that this movie started as a prospect entitled: Road Trip 2: The Road to Bummersville. Its tag line could have been, “The Feel Good Downer of the year”.

The acting here was very good with a strong cast (Kinnear, Arkin, Carell, and Collette). All the characters felt believable and realistic. Sometimes you get these great line ups w/ a weak link or two that brings the whole thing down, but not here. But the story itself is not terribly unique though. It tells the tale of a dysfunctional family which struggles through obstacles and over disconnects between them to reach a goal. Their goal being to get the youngest child, Olive, to a beauty pageant 700+ miles away.

Nothing goes better with a dysfunctional family than those wacky obstacles like I mentioned. First, their clutch goes out, requiring them to push their van to get it started. Next, the father’s job prospect (selling his motivational book) falls through. The uncle, Frank, while purchasing hardcore porn for the grandfather runs into his old flame, a former male student, whom indirectly lead to his attempted suicide Has anyone died yet? No? Well let’s throw this in then. The grandfather dies, possibly in connection to his heroin-snorting addiction, while sharing a room with little Olive, so she is left to determine “he won’t wake up”. Faced with the delay of paperwork at the hospital the family decides to push him out the window and take him along for the rest of the ride. Seriously. Toting along the dead relative was funny in Vacation, but not so much here. Lastly, I guess, the self-imposed mute son discovers he is color blind and can’t be a jet pilot, erasing his 9 month effort of not talking until he was accepted into the Air Force Academy. I’m not sure how they found the time to get all those events into the story.

Once the family reaches its goal , only then do they realize the situation (Olive is no beauty queen) and the mistake they’ve made (um, Olive is no beauty queen). So when things go bad during her talent performance they do what any scripted family would do, and jump on stage to help Olive finish her inappropriate burlesque show. After attacking the show’s host the family is made to promise they’ll never enter another pageant in the state of California. So I guess a sequel is out of the question, or is it?!

I wouldn’t say the movie was bad, because it wasn’t. But it certainly wasn’t as comedic as I felt the marketing indicated. I did get one laugh when Olive was asked where her grandfather was and she replied, “In the trunk of our van”, because he was dead, remember? If you enjoy the indie film arena and can keep your spirits up for an hour and a half I’d semi-recommend it.