Cheaper by the Dozen
The stultifying new remake of "Cheaper by the Dozen" is set in the boonies of Illinois, where the Bakers live in a town called Midland. Their house is nestled in what passes comfortably for the middle of nowhere. But most of Tom and Kate Baker's 12 children seem to have been flown in from a casting office in Burbank. They have the voices of fruit drink pitch persons and the unquenchable energy of in-the-flesh Rugrats. One likes fashion and beauty, one likes his skateboard, two like to wrestle, one loves his science equipment, and several sport lots of athletic wear. These aren't kids, they're aisles at Target.
Without explicitly saying so, this movie suggests that for a generation of American families, the ozone layer of regional identity is being depleted by the generic gases of popular culture. Is there anything the EPA can do?
"Cheaper by the Dozen" wants us to believe that Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt, who've never left Illinois, could give birth to Lizzie McGuire (Hilary Duff), the chick from "Coyote Ugly" (Piper Perabo), and the dude currently playing young Clark Kent on "Smallville" (Tom Welling) -- and those are just the faces we recognize.
The story takes the Bakers from Midland to somewhere very close to Chicago, where Tom will start his dream job of coaching a Division I football team and the family will unravel. The kids want dad to quit his job so the family can go back to Midland, although the difference between their new suburb and their old Podunk is negligible. The kids at school just seem even more generic than the ones ripping through the Baker household.
You know this is a Steve Martin vehicle because he's the stressed-out dad in charge of day care and car pooling, while Hunt as mom goes off to promote her book about how to raise the brood. The kids complain that the arrangement is tearing the family apart, while father enlists reinforcements in the form of Perabo, the eldest daughter. She participates over the objections of her selfish, unanimously disliked live-in boyfriend, played by Ashton Kutcher, whose fame perplexes as his filmography grows. (It's a raging disappointment that Kutcher never squares off against fellow ex-model Welling, who looks 10 years too old to be playing the bullied would-be high-school quarterback.)
In the 1950 original, Clifton Webb was an eccentric who used his brood as lab rats for his science experiments; the movie is quaint Americana now. This remake has a crass and charmless wonder that's old-fashioned in its own right: What happens to families when parents prioritize their careers midlife? If they're as enterprising as the stay-at-home mother in this movie or the jobless fathers in "Daddy Day Care," they exploit the kids for success.
Martin puts a thankless gloss on the antic role he played in "Parenthood." As his wife, Hunt is the movie's saving grace. Nonstop chaos doesn't faze her. Every week, she sends the kids off to school on her television show. Owning her own sitcom means she can let the deafening chaos in this one roll off her back.
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