Starring: Ice Cube, Nia Long, Aleisha Allen, Philip Bolden

1 out of 10 stars

Few words can strike terror into the hearts of moviegoers as much as "A Brian Levant Film." What, you're not quaking in your boots? Let me throw out some words – or rather, titles. Beethoven. Snow Dogs. Problem Child 2. Jingle All the Way. And if those weren't enough, how about this horrifying double whammy: The Flintstones and The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas. If you're not breaking out into a cold sweat, then I fear I must tell you something gravely personal about yourself that you may not quite realize: you are not human. I'm getting my wooden stake right now.

Mr. Levant is the man responsible for directing the above films, and he now adds yet another ignominious disaster to the funeral pyre that is his film career. Are We There Yet? is a disastrous kiddie road-trip movie that wouldn't even pass muster on a particularly bad Saturday afternoon for the Disney Channel and is made only slightly palatable by the presence of Ice Cube. You have to like someone who compares children to cockroaches, "except that you can't squish `em," while unironically dressing up in enough sportswear and bling-bling that he himself resembles an overgrown child desperately trying to imitate a rap star. But much like many men before him, who have felt the need to soften their tough guy images with a Heartfelt Family Film Featuring Small Children, he is undone by the tinkly music and tear-stained moist hugs that punctuate the movie with an incessant rhythmic repetition that would make a metronome seem off-kilter.

This quagmire of a movie centers around Nick (Cube), a former pro athlete who now runs a Portland sports memorabilia store – and a very profitable one too, for he's just bought himself a tricked-out SUV (to describe it by brand name would only be in service the obvious product placement that is half the movie's raison d'etre). An avowed kid-hater – it's a deal-breaker with any woman he dates – Nick soon finds his heart melting for the comely Suzanne (Nia Long), a shrieky party planner and single mother with two conniving kids bound and determined to set her up again with their long-gone dad – and dissuade any potential suitors in the process. When their deadbeat dad fails to take the kids for New Year's Eve, just as Suzanne's running up to Vancouver for a big make-or-break job, Nick offers to chaperone the gruesome twosome up north. Airport fiasco gives way to train station fiasco and ultimately the three hit the road, with the predictable destruction of the SUV and the requisite adult-child bonding in the offing.

Cube is as passable as is humanly possible when having to hold conversations with a talking bobble-head doll (Satchel Page, dispensing wisdom), but the rest of the cast is so phenomenally irritating that it makes Are We There Yet? one of the more unbearable kid-friendly movies in recent memory. Little Aleisha Allen digs a bit too far into her bossy, snotty character that she comes across as an unredeemable brat, and the young actor playing her little brother, Philip Bolden, has the ultimate misfortune to resemble Janet Jackson at certain camera angles, and seems to possess the singer's wan acting abilities as well. Aside from one joke involving projectile vomiting, the kids don't have a spontaneous bone in their body and trudge through their lines with alternate surliness and saccharine. The most egregious offender in the movie, though, is Long, whose shrilly acting style hearkens back to Kim Basinger at her '80s worst; actually, it's more like Basinger at her worst minus 50 IQ points. With such a trio of unlikable characters, and a lead who appears devoted to them for no apparent reason, the movie is ultimately so unbearable that a title change will most like come to you about halfway through. It shouldn't be called Are We There Yet? but rather Is It Over Yet?