When creating a family movie there are two audiences in which filmmakers must try to reach – the child and the guardian. “Yours, Mine and Ours” does a good job of engrossing the first target and seems to ignore the second.
The new Nickelodeon backed film (a remake of a 1968 film of the same title) centers around two widowers, each with an amazing amount of children, who rekindle an old high school flame and decide to rush into a marriage without telling their children.
Frank Beardsley (Dennis Quaid) is a Coast Guard admiral who has recently moved back to his hometown of New London, Conn. to instruct at the Coast Gaurd Academy. Beardsley, the father of eight children, runs into his old high school sweetheart Helen North (Rene Russo) while on a blind date with his friend’s ex-wife. The brief encounter leaves the two yearning for their “glory days” but each, fearing that the other is married, does not act upon their emotions.
North, a handbag designer and mother of 10 children (six biologicaly, four adopted), once again meets Beardsley at their 30-year high school reunion. Once again the two hit it off and decide to marry that night. Both sets of children are unerstandably annoyed, but are none the less forced to accept the new situation.
The new couple move their family into an enormous lighthouse (apparently the Old Woman’s Shoe was being rented out to the Partridges), and try to make the two sets of children gel. This, of course, does not work well because Beardsley’s children are use to military discipline and the North kids are used to new-age child rearing. Deciding that they can no longer live with each other, the two sets of children go about destroying their parents’ marriage by getting their parents to hate each other.
As can be expected, the children learn, while trying to sabotage the marriage, that they actually like each other and consider one another siblings.
This film is predictable and boring. It lacks originality and moves slowly (an impressive feat considering that the film is only 90 minutes). It lacks any admireable characters: Beardsley and North would rather leave their kids with an alcoholic nanny, so that they can make whoopie, than deal with their family issues, and their children would rather destroy their parent’s lives than attempt to make them better.
This movie offers few laughs, and the ones that it does offer are either unintentional or metaphorical. For instance; the fact that all the kids are taken to school in a short bus is not funny because of what is intended by the image – the family is so large they take up a whole bus – but because the image actually works as an allegory for the movie itself. Watching this film is like watching an hour and a half worth of short bus security footage.
“Yours, Mine and Ours” has nothing to seperate itself from other family films and nothing an adult audience would find redeaming. The best bet is to drop the kids off at “Yours, Mine and Ours” and go Holiday shopping. Its better than leaving them with the alcoholic nanny.
