Movie Review: RV

By Cynthia Fuchs

From our provider:

Rate This Article

Click Star to Rate...

0 Comments

What Parents Should Know
Parents should know the film is premised on a tedious sitcommish conceit: A father lies to his family about the reason for their vacation. The predictable road trip hijinks include problems with the RV's septic system (sewage exploding all over Robin Williams), sulky children, RV crashes and bad roads, mud and rain, wild raccoons, hip-hop bullies, and fellow travelers ridiculed for seeming "hick." These travelers include a mother who shows lots of skin and frequent cleavage. Children behave badly toward adults, adults behave badly toward children. Language includes sexual references; violence is comprised mainly of comic antics and pratfalls.

Families can discuss the importance of families spending time together. How does Bob forget the need for this intimacy in his desire to provide for his family financially? How do the kids learn to "appreciate" their father when he admits his mistakes? Is all the gross-out humor necessary to make the movie entertaining?

Common Sense Media Review
Unoriginal and unfunny, Barry Sonnenfeld's RV puts yet another dysfunctional family though the paces of yet another summer vacation. Though Bob (Robin Williams) means well, he's so caught up in efforts to "provide" for wife Jamie (Cheryl Hines) and two kids, Cassie (Joanna 'JoJo' Levesque, a lovely performer who spends too much of this film looking grumpy) and Carl (Josh Hutcherson), that he's lost track of their evolving lives and interests. (The film opens with a scene looking back on young Cassie just loving her daddy's sock-puppet show, then cuts to her sulking in the back seat as he complains in the front.)

Hoping to bring everyone together for a trip to Hawaii, Bob is stymied by his arrogant young boss Todd (Will Arnett), and decides to drive to Colorado in an RV instead, pretending it's another sort of vacation, though really it's a way for Bob to get to a business meeting and make a crucial presentation. No surprise, "roughing it" on the road involves a series of raucous physical gags: the septic tank explosion, the angry raccoons, the downpour, the RV's gradual demolition. Not only does the movie abuse its characters, it condescends to its viewers, presuming a lowest-denominator sense of humor.

Bob and his family have numerous lessons to learn, including charity, responsibility, and honesty. They misjudge and deride a yahoo-seeming family, aw-shucksy Travis (Jeff Daniels), his busty and big-smiling wife Marie Jo (Kristin Chenoweth), and their three earnest, home-schooled kids Earl (Hunter Parrish), Moon (director's daughter Chloe Sonnenfeld), and precious little insomniac Billy (Alex Ferris). These characters-as-sketches only amplify Bob's self-centeredness, which really doesn't need amplifying. We get it. He'll learn to be a better dad if only he can hit rock bottom. In this case, that involves being dragged and thrown by the runaway RV, chasing the RV into a lake, and riding his specially designed bike over mountain trails to the presentation, so he arrives muddied and ragged.

While writer Geoff Rodkey is responsible for Shaggy Dog (and so, has been to this sort of tedious-humor well before), Sonnenfeld made Men In Black and Get Shorty: You know he can do better.

Families who like this movie should check out National Lampoon's Vacation (1980), What About Bob?, and Popeye (in which Robin Williams gives an underappreciated and inspired performance).