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A Fox release. Written by Todd R. Jones and Earl Richey Jones; directed by Christopher Erskin; starring Cedric the Entertainer and Vanessa Williams. Released to DVD on August 10, 2004.  It’s been a long year so far. Nothing makes a film critic’s job harder than having to continually come up with new and interesting things to say about the same recycled movies; having already written about Welcome to Mooseport, Along Came Polly, Starsky & Hutch and The Perfect Score, I just wasn’t sure what else to say. Director Donald Petrie’s proliferation in recent years has done nothing to make anyone’s life better. The trouble with this glut of movies, which also includes Petrie’s other works like How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, The Wedding Planner and director Christopher Erskin’s film here at hand, Johnson Family Vacation, isn’t that they are poorly made films, but that they are all cut from the same exact cloth. It’s almost as if fifty influential studio executives all bought the same how-to-manual and refuse to listen to any other ideas. I can almost see a well-dressed studio executive telling would-be directors over lunch at a trendy bistro on Wilshire, "If the budget’s over $10 million you have to follow this set of rules," and then handing them his dog-eared copy of How to Make a Studio Comedy for Money and Profit. Should the director question this logic, the studio executive will simply hold up a hand and whisper three words. "The Cable Guy". The befuddled director will then assure himself of a future in indie rock videos (if he’s lucky) by furrowing his brow and stating, "But I liked The Cable Guy." Cedric the Entertainer stars in Johnson Family Vacation as Nate Johnson, the consummate family man who wants nothing more than to take his family on a cross-country trip to his mother’s house in St. Louis in order to attend the Johnson family reunion. Trouble ensues. If Johnson Family Vacation sounds exactly like Harold Ramis’ 1982 comedy called Vacation, it’s because Johnson Family Vacation is Vacation… with an urban twist. Not only does the film open with Nate and his son, DJ (Bow wow), stopping at an auto dealership to pick up their new car only to learn that they’ve been given the wrong model, but it features a host of other shockingly similar parallels. Nate has a strict time schedule planned for the trip, has planned a number of visits to scenic and historic spots along the way, flirts shamelessly with other good-looking women, has a run in with a cop on a motorcycle, unwittingly consumes urine, has a number of comically off-balanced relatives, begins a rivalry with a trucker, loses all of his family’s luggage out of the back of his car, ultimately meets with a small town mechanic about fixing his car, and continuously attempts and fails to have sex with his wife (Vanessa Williams). About the only entertainment I experience watching Johnson Family Vacation was counting the number of Vacation references I could find. Surprisingly, Erskin seems to have gotten into this as well, once giving Williams reason to refer to their family’s planned trip to see the world’s largest ball of yarn; in Vacation, the Griswold’s were planning to see the world’s largest ball of twine.  After visiting Dodge City in Vacation, Clark Griswold is informed that his tomfoolery has caused his daughter to go deaf. "Ah, what’s the difference," Clark says. "It was fun anyway." It was this sense of irreverence and edginess that made Vacation the successful comedy that it is; a lot of Ramis’ film is funny because it’s wrong. By editing out the grand majority of these awkward moments (and a large amount of humor with them) and casting Cedric the Entertainer in the lead, Johnson Family Vacation seems designed to be a warmer, cuddlier, friendlier movie than Vacation. If only that could explain the whole urine drinking sequence…
chris neumer yes, it's true: RadioShack spokeswoman, former-Miss America, Vanessa Williams is married to basketball player Rick Fox. |
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