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Stuck in 'park'

Family-trip flick 'RV' not exactly a gas

Robert Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News

Published April 28, 2006 at midnight

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It's always a little dangerous to suggest that a scene from a movie has career implications for an actor, but RV had me wondering.

Not too long into the painfully formulaic RV, Robin Williams' character is sprayed with excrement. He's attempting to drain waste from an RV when things go terribly wrong. Call me crazy, but I'm saying that when an actor is showered with fecal matter, it's difficult to say that things are going well for him.

Barry Sonnenfeld, whose directorial career includes Men in Black and Wild Wild West, takes charge of a bumpy road trip in which Williams plays Bob, a father who spends too much time at his job. He works for a soft- drink company.

The plot contrives to have Bob take his brood to Boulder. His company is trying to acquire a hippy-dippy soda company that prides itself on a "natural," family-oriented approach. Given his work requirements, Bob does what any self-respecting father would do: He lies.

Because he must attend an important meeting in Colorado, he tells his family that he's canceled a planned Hawaiian trip so that he can restore family togetherness in a rented RV. You know that imagination won't be a strong suit when Bob immediately begins the trip by ramming his rented behemoth into various stationary objects.

The movie fills up with lame humor as Bob tries to convince his wife (Cheryl Hines of Curb Your Enthusiasm) and two children (singer Joanna "JoJo" Levesque and Josh Hutcherson) that the trip, which brims with predictable disasters, is lots of fun.

They don't have fun, and neither do we as the script rolls out its mostly juvenile collection of jokes. At one point, we meet the Gornicke family, gleeful goofballs headed by Jeff Daniels and Kristin Chenoweth. Daniels, recently praised for his work in The Squid and the Whale, does a good job with goofy, but it's not nearly enough to the save the movie.

RV's map can't bring it close to other movies in which family members suffer through horrible vacations only to discover that they really care about one another. Williams gets off a few decent lines, but as I watched him try to climb on top of a speeding bus, I kept asking myself, "Didn't I used to think this guy was funny?"

RV

Dad takes the family on an RV trip

• Grade: D+

• Rating: PG

• Running time: 99 minutes