College Road Trip

This is a movie so woefully miscalculated and unfunny, it boggles my mind that the four separate people credited to the screenplay could have thought they were working on something people would find enjoyable. College Road Trip concerns itself with people who could never exist, saying things that people never say, and doing things that people never do. I understand this is a comedy (in theory, not in execution), but even comedy needs some realm of believability in order to work. You know you're in trouble when your movie has a scene where a father and daughter parachute out of a plane, then immediately carjack a golf cart so that the daughter can get to her college interview on time, and you find yourself thinking that the earlier scenes dealing with a super intelligent pig who can play chess and solve a Rubix Cube were more believable.

College Road Trip is the second starring vehicle for Martin Lawrence in less than a month, and the second strike out for the man. I didn't like him in Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins, and I think I hated him more here. That's because he's supposed to be playing an overly protective father, but Lawrence's performance is so over the top, he starts to resemble a madman, and I found myself fearing for the safety of his family. Consider this example: Lawrence plays a cop who doesn't want to let his teenage daughter go, and becomes afraid when he finds out she has plans to attend Georgetown University, which is too far away for him to keep an eye on her. When he finds out about the Georgetown plan, he goes to the shooting range to blow off some steam. He overhears a pair of fellow officers talking about the crazy things they used to do back in college, and this makes him so angry, he starts picking up a bigger gun each time, and blowing bigger holes into the target. By the end, he's cackling like an escapee from a mental hospital, and has a crazed look in his eye. What is this supposed to represent? I had visions that the next scene would include Lawrence coming home, and splattering his family across the walls with a shotgun. The only thing that convinced me otherwise is that this was a Disney movie, and that its rated G. A more serious movie, and my hunch probably would have been right, considering Lawrence's take on this scene.

Despite Martin Lawrence getting first billing, the real star of the movie is Raven-Symone, who plays the daughter. She's a young actress who got her start appearing on The Cosby Show, and has since become popular on The Disney Channel in a self-titled sitcom, That's So Raven. This is her first leading big screen role, and not only does she star in it, but she's also credited as one of the Executive Producers and gets to sing on the soundtrack. This is supposed to launch her movie career, so I guess it's only natural that director Roger Kumble (Just Friends) would throw in a scene where she gets to sing. This movie mishandles the opportunity, however, by making the musical number completely stop the movie, and not in a good way. The scene in question comes when the father and daughter are riding on a bus filled with Japanese tourists. Raven-Symone decides to take over the karaoke machine, and launches the entire bus into a music and dance number. It's not only badly choreographed, it's also pointless, and the scene exists only because the young actress is one of the producers, and she wanted to highlight her singing talents. If Miss Pearman (that's her last name, according to her info on the IMDB) wanted her first film to be a vanity project, she should have held out for a better script.

I realize I'm pretty far into this review, and I haven't talked much about the plot. Not much to talk about, really. As I mentioned earlier, Lawrence is an overly protective/borderline psychotic father who decides to drive his daughter cross country to Georgetown University, so that they can spend some time together. They have a couple stowaways in the form of Lawrence's young nerdy son, and the son's pet pig who is smart enough to play chess and understand English, but is not smart enough to realize that eating a bunch of coffee beans is not a good idea. This leads to the inevitable scene where the pig will be buzzed on caffeine, and start running around in sped up motion around the building. This moment also leads into a second inevitable scene, where the buzzed pig will crash a nearby wedding for the sole purpose that a road trip comedy is not complete until there is either a food fight, or someone gets splattered with a lot of food. Not much really happens during the entire time the family is on the road. The entire movie has a fragmented and episodic quality, almost as if the script was written in bits and pieces, and then they tried putting those pieces together in a coherent fashion. There's a scene where father and daughter find themselves forced to jump out of a plane, and there's a scene where the father winds up in prison after he breaks into a Sorority House to spy on his daughter while she's having an innocent sleep over there, but nothing really registers. That's mainly due to the lazy humor on display that usually revolves around the actors mugging for the camera.

The movie also touches upon another well-worn road trip cliche, in that every family comedy centered around a road trip needs to have the main family constantly have run ins with another obnoxiously perky family. The obnoxious family must be happy to the point of idiocy, and must also like to sing the entire time. (Folk songs and showtunes are preferable music choices.) I am reminded of R.V., the family road trip comedy from 2006 that featured Robin Williams and his screen family having constant run ins with such a family. The head of that family was played by Jeff Daniels, an actor I admire, who at least seemed to be making an effort with the character the movie had given him. The head of the obnoxious family in College Road Trip is played by Donny Osmond, and if you ever need any proof that Donny Osmond is no Jeff Daniels, here it is. He certainly has the obnoxious part down, but he does it so well that he's never actually funny. You just want to scrape him right off the screen. I did not recognize the women who play his wife and teenage daughter, but they match him every step of the way in making me wish they weren't even in the movie in the first place. I will close this paragraph by stating that Donny Osmond has given Larry the Cable Guy some hard competition when it comes time to decide the worst performance of 2008 at the end of the year.

College Road Trip is mind-rotting entertainment that will kill some time for kids, and kill any desire for an adult to want to ever sit through it again. The movie is only 83 minutes long, which would normally be a good thing, except for the fact that even watching three minutes of this thing is too much to ask for. I'm sure the movie will make money, as it's the only new family film playing at the moment. The studio will surely be pleased with the opening weekend numbers, but wouldn't they be even more pleased with the knowledge that they had also put out a good movie? If this movie is successful, all it will do is inspire Martin Lawrence to make more movies just like it. That's not a good thing, in case you're wondering.

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