Having recovered from wounds received in a failed rescue operation, Navy SEAL Shane Wolfe is handed a new assignment: Protect the five Plummer kids from enemies of their recently deceased father -- a government scientist whose top-secret experiment remains in the kids' house.
Two men, Charlie Hinton (Eddie Murphy) and Phil Ryerson (Jeff Garlin), get laid off and have to become stay-at-home dads when they can't find jobs. This inspires them to open their own day-care center.
Identical twins Annie and Hallie, separated at birth and each raised by one of their biological parents, later discover each other for the first time at summer camp and make a plan to bring their wayward parents back together.
Director:
Nancy Meyers
Stars:
Lindsay Lohan,
Dennis Quaid,
Natasha Richardson
Mia Thermopolis has just found out that she is the heir apparent to the throne of Genovia. With her friends Lilly and Michael Moscovitz in tow, she tries to navigate through the rest of her sixteenth year.
Director:
Garry Marshall
Stars:
Julie Andrews,
Anne Hathaway,
Hector Elizondo
Set in an era where superheroes are commonly known and accepted, young William Stronghold, the son of the Commander and Jetstream, tries to find a balance between being a normal teenager and an extraordinary being.
Director:
Mike Mitchell
Stars:
Kurt Russell,
Kelly Preston,
Michael Angarano
After a Navy SEAL fails to rescue a scientist who developed a top secret device, he is assigned to guard the man's children while searching for information on where the device may be hidden inside the house. Along the way, he must cope with rebellious teens, child care, an overbearing school official, and foreign spies also looking for it.Written by
Disneyfication
They had to shine a red light at Vin Diesel's ear to get the duck to bite it. See more »
Goofs
In the chaos scene, Peter is standing in the fish tank wearing a red cape. In one shot the cape is half out and half in the water, then in the next shot it is all in the water, and in the rest of the shots it is back to half and half. See more »
Quotes
[after Shane just did the Peter Panda Dance for Peter]
Peter Plummer:
Good night, Daddy!
See more »
Alternate Versions
In the UK, the word 'spaz' was substituted with 'jerk' in order to obtain a PG certificate as opposed to a 12. See more »
In brief: "A bit more cutesy than "Kindergarten Cop," but more family-friendly, and Vin Diesel shows his versatility."
I don't usually attend screenings for kids' movies, but when I first found out about this film, I was very curious to see how Vin Diesel would do in a kid's film. I've liked Vin Diesel ever since "Pitch Black", and while some may dismiss him as a muscle-bound action workhorse, I've long thought that there was more to him lurking behind that facade, and remembering the skepticism that greeted Arnold Schwarzenegger's attempts at comedyskepticism that was greeted with what I thought were successful turns in "Twins" and "Kindergarten Cop", I was curious to see how successfully Diesel would play against type.
The result is a family film more cutesy and farcical than "Kindergarten Cop", (the model my mind kept going back to for comparison), with an unfortunately greater focus on infant waste products, but greater conflict between Diesel and his young charges, which lends itself to more heartwarming moments of rapport-building.
Diesel plays Lt. Shane Wolfe, a Navy SEAL assigned to protect the five children of a top scientist (Tate Donovan), and find a hidden computer program that may be secreted in his house while their mother (Faith Ford) and Wolfe's C.O. journey to Zurich to try and find the right code word for the scientist's safety deposit box. A simple assignment, it seems, except these kids have issues. Eldest son Seth is defiant, suffers bullying from fellow students and the school's V.P., and is negligent in his wrestling team responsibilities. Oldest daughter Zoe ("American Dreams"'s Brittany Snow) is truant in her Driver's Ed class, and willfully disobedient. The problems of the youngest three, Lulu, Peter, and Tyler, seem simpler, but are no less mountainous for Wolfe, who first tries addressing these problems with the roughshod military discipline he's accustomed to, but soon finds himself changing tactics by listening to these kids' problems, and helping them out more as a parent than a military bodyguard. Whereas Schwarzenegger's character was instantly ingratiated with the object of his protection in "Kindergarten Cop" by becoming friends and eventually boyfriend to his mom, and merely had to win his class' attention, here Wolfe has the more difficult task of cutting through the layers of resentment in a pair of teenagers, taking care of an infant and two young children, and protecting them from assassins that come crashing through windows, which lends itself to both some genuinely warm moments when he opens up to Seth and Zoe, and some surprisingly interesting but funny action sequences that seem evocative of Jackie Chan, with a really nice setup-and-payoff when Wolfe realizes the secret to getting to the computer program.
This is obviously a film geared more for the kids, as evidenced by the kooky overacting, the silly Swiss stereotypes (which I didn't even realized existed), and the goofy actions on the part of the bad guys, such as the revelation, for example, that squirting a juice box into a bad guy's face is akin to spraying it with acid (and somehow keeps the bad guy from falling backward in response), but while that may be a let-down to the older folk, the parents will probably be pleased, since I recall some parents being upset with the more adult scenes in "Kindergarten Cop".
The bottom line is, bring the kids to see it, but if unless you're a die-hard Diesel fan, and want to see anything he does, it probably won't be your cup of tea if you're past grade school.
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In brief: "A bit more cutesy than "Kindergarten Cop," but more family-friendly, and Vin Diesel shows his versatility."
I don't usually attend screenings for kids' movies, but when I first found out about this film, I was very curious to see how Vin Diesel would do in a kid's film. I've liked Vin Diesel ever since "Pitch Black", and while some may dismiss him as a muscle-bound action workhorse, I've long thought that there was more to him lurking behind that facade, and remembering the skepticism that greeted Arnold Schwarzenegger's attempts at comedyskepticism that was greeted with what I thought were successful turns in "Twins" and "Kindergarten Cop", I was curious to see how successfully Diesel would play against type.
The result is a family film more cutesy and farcical than "Kindergarten Cop", (the model my mind kept going back to for comparison), with an unfortunately greater focus on infant waste products, but greater conflict between Diesel and his young charges, which lends itself to more heartwarming moments of rapport-building.
Diesel plays Lt. Shane Wolfe, a Navy SEAL assigned to protect the five children of a top scientist (Tate Donovan), and find a hidden computer program that may be secreted in his house while their mother (Faith Ford) and Wolfe's C.O. journey to Zurich to try and find the right code word for the scientist's safety deposit box. A simple assignment, it seems, except these kids have issues. Eldest son Seth is defiant, suffers bullying from fellow students and the school's V.P., and is negligent in his wrestling team responsibilities. Oldest daughter Zoe ("American Dreams"'s Brittany Snow) is truant in her Driver's Ed class, and willfully disobedient. The problems of the youngest three, Lulu, Peter, and Tyler, seem simpler, but are no less mountainous for Wolfe, who first tries addressing these problems with the roughshod military discipline he's accustomed to, but soon finds himself changing tactics by listening to these kids' problems, and helping them out more as a parent than a military bodyguard. Whereas Schwarzenegger's character was instantly ingratiated with the object of his protection in "Kindergarten Cop" by becoming friends and eventually boyfriend to his mom, and merely had to win his class' attention, here Wolfe has the more difficult task of cutting through the layers of resentment in a pair of teenagers, taking care of an infant and two young children, and protecting them from assassins that come crashing through windows, which lends itself to both some genuinely warm moments when he opens up to Seth and Zoe, and some surprisingly interesting but funny action sequences that seem evocative of Jackie Chan, with a really nice setup-and-payoff when Wolfe realizes the secret to getting to the computer program.
This is obviously a film geared more for the kids, as evidenced by the kooky overacting, the silly Swiss stereotypes (which I didn't even realized existed), and the goofy actions on the part of the bad guys, such as the revelation, for example, that squirting a juice box into a bad guy's face is akin to spraying it with acid (and somehow keeps the bad guy from falling backward in response), but while that may be a let-down to the older folk, the parents will probably be pleased, since I recall some parents being upset with the more adult scenes in "Kindergarten Cop".
The bottom line is, bring the kids to see it, but if unless you're a die-hard Diesel fan, and want to see anything he does, it probably won't be your cup of tea if you're past grade school.