This is a movie that knows its audience and realizes it doesn't need much of a story to hit that audience, literally, where it lives.
Cheaper by the Dozen (2003)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:109
Fresh:25
Rotten:84
Average Rating:4.5/10
Consensus: In this family of twelve children, much chaos ensues, but little hilarity.
Rated: PG [See Full Rating] for language and some thematic elements
Runtime: 1 hr 46 mins
Genre: Comedies
Theatrical Release:13-02-2004
Synopsis: College sweethearts Tom (Steve Martin) and Kate (Bonnie Hunt) both dreamed of having both fulfilling careers and a huge family. But after they had a few kids, Kate gave up her career as a... College sweethearts Tom (Steve Martin) and Kate (Bonnie Hunt) both dreamed of having both fulfilling careers and a huge family. But after they had a few kids, Kate gave up her career as a sportswriter, Tom abandoned his hope of becoming the coach of their alma mater's football team, and they moved their brood from the city to the country. Now, after 12 children and a happy life in rural Illinois, Tom has been offered the chance to live his dream and coach the Stallions. No sooner does the family pack up and move to Chicago to pursue Tom's dream job than Kate's ship comes in as well: a publisher has picked up her manuscript based on her experiences raising 12 children. Of course, there's a hitch. Kate has to go to New York for a few days, leaving Tom as the primary caregiver for his clan. Can Tom hold it together with his kids--who didn't want to move in the first place--pulling him one way and the university pulling him the other? Shawn Levy directs this likable update of the 1950 film of the same title, which was based on a true (and very different) story. [More]
Starring: Bonnie Hunt, Steve Martin, Tom Welling, Piper Perabo
Starring: Bonnie Hunt, Steve Martin, Tom Welling, Piper Perabo, Hilary Duff, Kevin Schmidt, Jacob Smith, Alyson Stoner, Morgan York, Liliana Mumy, Forrest Landis, Blake Woodruff, Brent Kinsman, Shane Kinsman, Ashton Kutcher
Director: Shawn Levy
Director: Shawn Levy
Screenwriter: Sam Harper, Joel Cohen, Alec Sokolow
Story: Craig Titley
Producer: Robert Simonds, Michael Barnathan, Ben Myron
Composer: Christophe Beck
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Reviews for Cheaper by the Dozen
Martin and Hunt give the production a mellow warmth. And Levy has cast an appealingly diverse bunch of kids to play the young Bakers.
So calculatedly cast with popular kid stars that it seems a focus group was guiding all the choices.
Though Tom Welling, Hilary Duff ... and Perabo are supposed to be the film's young stars, their thinly written characters leave Kutcher free to make more of his screen time than the three of them put together.
We are not only asked to find the barbarian Baker brood a model of familial loyalty and unconditional devotion, we're also asked to regard with contempt everyone else who does not share the Bakers' unbridled consumerist anarchy.
The warmth, messiness and gentle humor Cheaper offers is nothing to sneeze at.
Martin may excel at playing buttoned-down, neurotic men coming apart at the seams, but he is wholly unconvincing playing dad to a lot of cute, precocious tykes from central casting.
A cringe-inducing mixture of tired slapstick and gooey sentimentality.
You want to like any movie that pairs Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt, but Cheaper by the Dozen just keeps getting Lamer by the Minute.
It's ostensibly a remake of the 1950 Walter Lang comedy, though latter-day audiences will detect a far greater kinship to an early episode of The Brady Bunch with twice the brats.
It wastes Hunt's whiplash-quick timing and further reduces the once-wild, once-crazy Martin to the generic father figure he has collected checks for in too many recent movies.
The cartoonish chaos will engage little ones, while Tom's struggle to balance career and home time should keep parents' eyes on the screen.
This remake of the 1950 movie is a bubbling crockpot of farcical mush to warm the tummies of anyone who really and truly misses The Brady Bunch.
All you need to know about the slapdash, bogus kiddie flick Cheaper by the Dozen can be summed up by the fact that Ashton Kutcher, making a glorified cameo as a narcissistic model-slash- actor, is the best thing in it.
There is not a frame of Cheaper that doesn't feel contrived. It fails the most fundamental test of movie logic.
You don't so much watch this witless, charmless, pointless fiasco as sit hostage, waiting for it to end.
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