The Bakers and the Murtaughs Square Off in Cheaper By the Dozen 2

I recently watched the Steve Martin remake of Cheaper By the Dozen, and while I found it predictably corny and slapstick-heavy, I also thought it was a fun and occasionally touching movie. When I realized that there was a sequel, I quickly stuck that in the queue, and it, too, is a silly but rather heartwarming family comedy that made for enjoyable viewing.

Tom Baker (Martin) and his wife Kate (Bonnie Hunt) have an expansive family that includes a dozen children. This movie takes place a couple years after the first, so the kids look pretty much the same, and I found it pretty easy to keep them straight this time around. I’m sure that was partly because I had another movie in which to get used to them, but even if you haven’t seen the first movie, I think this one introduces everyone fairly well, and it works as a stand-alone. In fact, considering that one of the main gags – my least favorite part of both movies – is recycled from the first, you might almost enjoy it more without having seen the original.

In this sequel, directed by Adam Shankman, Tom is feeling a bit weepy because his daughter Lorraine (Hilary Duff) has just graduated from high school and is moving to New York, and his oldest daughter, a now married and very pregnant Nora (Piper Perabo), is moving to Texas in the fall. One advantage of having seen the first movie here is that we can see how much better her husband Bud (Jonathan Bennett) is for her than her dopey boyfriend in that movie. Bud is both kind and accomplished, and he understands Nora’s need to feel connected to her family. It doesn’t take much to get him to agree to join in the family vacation Tom proposes.

In years past, the Bakers made a habit of visiting Lake Winnetka, Wisconsin, and for nostalgia’s sake, this is where they return. Unfortunately, their cabin has fallen into a state of disrepair and is still occupied by a kleptomaniac rat. Meanwhile, Tom’s lifelong nemesis Jimmy Murtaugh (Eugene Levy) has an expansive, state-of-the-art summer home nearby, and it isn’t long before their old rivalry heats up and the rest of the two families get dragged down with them. The Murtaugh clan includes Jimmy’s much younger and more easy-going fourth wife Sarina (Carmen Electra) and eight children, all of whom seem to be extremely accomplished and disciplined.

Jimmy runs a tight ship and rubs it in that Tom’s crew is so chaotic, and before long, the Murtaughs and Bakers are locked into competition for a trophy that only the dads care about. The kids and wives get along fine, but the antagonism of the fathers toward each other puts a damper on everyone else’s fun. I’ve seen Martin and Levy together before in Bringing Down the House, and they have great comic chemistry whether they’re playing best buddies or squabbling neighbors. Tom swings between goofy and sentimental and militant and over-involved; some of the time I sympathized with him, and other times I wanted to throttle him. Even at his most irritating, though, I can’t help finding Martin pretty lovable. Levy’s Jimmy is dull and haughty, and it’s easy to see why he annoys Tom so much. I always enjoy Levy’s bland, deadpan comedic style, and it works well here. Meanwhile, Hunt and Electra work well together in less exaggerated roles.

We don’t really get to know the individual Murtaughs too well, with two exceptions, and both are because of how they relate to the Bakers. Anne (Jaime King), the oldest of the Murtaughs and the apple of her father’s eye, is struggling to summon the courage to tell him she doesn’t want to go into the family business. Meanwhile, she’s caught the attention of Tom Welling’s Charlie, who is off on his own now but working in the city to stay close to his family despite being a country boy at heart. Charlie is a lot less angsty this time around, and I liked his storyline. The male standout among the Murtaugh kids is a young Taylor Lautner as Eliot, a sunny lad who steals the heart of tomboy Sarah (Alyson Stoner) in a sweet puppy love storyline that prompts some pretty abhorrent behavior from both dads, especially Tom. While I still love Mark (Forrest Landis), the four-eyed frog lover with my favorite storyline in the first movie, he takes a major backseat here, and Sarah becomes the most interesting of the Bakers to me this time around as she navigates the joys and humiliations of first love.

As before, slapstick abounds, and sometimes that means massive disaster. The Bakers are responsible for two incidents that cause thousands of dollars in damage, and I couldn’t bring myself to find either of those scenes nearly as funny as they were intended to be, though I did wonder whether an incident involving fireworks may have been inspired by a scene early in Peter Jackson’s version of Fellowship of the Ring. Aside from the rampant destruction in a few scenes, I didn’t mind the chaos much, and I thought this holiday at the lake seemed like a pretty idyllic vacation, warring patriarchs aside. The comedy is pretty predictable stuff, but it nonetheless kept my parents and me laughing. If you’re looking for a light-hearted, summery flick for the family, I’d say Cheaper By the Dozen 2 fits the bill.

A Boatload of Bakers Means Bushels of Baloney in Cheaper By the Dozen

Remakes seem to be rampant in theaters lately. One of the many to hit the big screen in the past decade was Cheaper By the Dozen, a remake of a 1950 classic that I never saw. As a fan of Steve Martin and Smallville’s Tom Welling, I’d wanted to check it out for a while, despite the high probability of cheesiness. I can’t make comparisons with the original, but now that I finally got around to seeing it, I liked it better than I expected. Is it corny? Yes. But I also found it funny and touching.

Tom Baker (Martin) is a small-time coach with a great big dream: to coach college football at his alma mater in Chicago. His wife Kate (Bonnie Hunt) has pretty big dreams too: writing and publishing a book. Both of these dreams have a shot at becoming a reality at once, which might be cause for excitement alone in an ordinary family. But this is no ordinary family. No, the Baker brood includes 12 children, 11 of whom still live at home. With Mom headed off to New York City to kick off a major book tour and Dad gearing up for what he hopes will be a winning season, who is going to keep an eye on a house full of rambunctious kids resentful that they had to leave their farmhouse home for life in the big city?

The movie does a decent job differentiating the characters, though some of them still blend together for me. In many cases, it doesn’t much matter who’s who; we just have rapid-fire chaos, some of which is funny, some of which is just cringe-inducing as one disaster follows another. Of the 12, about half are more a part of the collective than really interesting stand-alone characters. These include twins Nigel and Kyle (Brent and Shane Kinsman), the energetic youngest of the clan; Mike (Blake Woodruff), their slightly older brother; twins Kim and Jessica (Morgan York and Liliana Mumy); and their brother Jake (Jacob Smith). Generally, they just add to the cacophony of the household without standing out too much as individuals.

The rest are more well-defined. Nora (Piper Perabo), the oldest at 22, lives in Chicago with her boyfriend, a dopey, egotistical aspiring actor played by Ashton Kutcher in typical obnoxious mode. While I started out feeling sorry for him, especially after the kids play a prank on him that is both crude and dangerous, it wasn’t long before I found him as unlikable as the rest of the Bakers do. Nora herself is fairly sweet but torn between loyalty to her family and devotion to her boyfriend. I was a little disappointed not to connect much to Welling’s character, angsty senior Charlie, who spends most of his time being sulky and sarcastic, though I did feel for him as he bemoaned the fact that he and his girlfriend would now be hours away from each other.

Hillary Duff starts out in full-on bratty teenager mode as Lorraine, a fashion-conscious high schooler, but she gradually becomes more likable as she sticks up for her siblings in trying situations. Henry (Kevin G. Schmidt) is a rough-and-tumble bully type, while devious Sarah (Alyson Stoner) is smart-mouthed and always has some sort of devilish plan up her sleeve. Kate seems to have everything pretty well organized so that the kids mostly stay out of each other’s way and disasters are kept to a minimum, but Tom can’t quite hack it. I love watching Martin in goofball dad mode, though as his stress increases over the course of the movie, his parenting skills suffer greatly.

My favorite Baker is Mark (Forrest Landis), a delicate, bespectacled child who is accident-prone and lonely. Subjected to a humiliating nickname that alludes to what an oddball he is within his own family, he seeks solace in his pet toad and the gorgeous tower room he manages to snag for himself in their Victorian mansion. Of the several sub-plots running throughout the movie, I found Mark’s the most compelling as he battles his insecurities and isolation and tries to figure out just how he fits in, and I was gratified to see that his journey is ultimately what brings together several of those loose threads and takes us to the movie’s most moving moment.

Yes, some of the kids’ hijinks get a little old. I’ve never been a big fan of destroy-the-house-style comedy, and we definitely get a fair bit of that here. The running gag with a falling chandelier is pretty tired by the time it’s run its course, though I suppose there is something inherently amusing about watching Wayne Knight fall off a ladder. The Bakers’ new neighbor Tina (Paula Marshall) is pretty hard to take with her shrill over-protectiveness, though I found her easy-going husband (Alan Ruck) and son Dylan (Steven Anthony Lawrence), who is extremely sheltered and longs for some excitement, pretty likable. The movie is heavy on the slapstick and the sap, but I didn’t mind the latter and the former wasn’t enough to turn me off of the movie. On the whole, I enjoyed this chronicle of one big sometimes-happy family trying to have it all. In fact, the sequel is already in my queue.