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Diaper gags and disposable plot make 'Daddy' a deadbeat
Eddie Murphy tries to control a rowdy brood in 'Daddy Day Care'
Columbia Pictures
Director: Steve Carr.
Stars: Eddie Murphy, Jeff Garlin, Steve Zahn.
MPAA rating: PG, for language.
It's yet another "Mr. Mom" variant (the first, at least, in a while), but with the kind of twist that makes it even easier to sell as fast-food entertainment.
When Charlie (Eddie Murphy) and shlub co-worker Phil (Jeff Garlin) are downsized from their jobs at an ad agency because a focus group of children rejects a cereal called Veggie-O's, the guys decide to care for their sons and a few other kids by opening a day care center in Charlie's suburban California home.
Never mind issues of insurance, liability, recommended guidelines, food selection and preparation and enough indelicate matters to make a reasoning audience gasp.
It's sufficient for the movie's purposes that the guys are silly and likable, even though they're inexperienced in parenting their own sons.
And to make sure we're in their corner, the other day care centers in their community are appalling or militaristically rigid.
Into the latter group falls -- ready? -- Miss Harridan (Anjelica Huston), the severe, butch headmistress of "the Marine Corps of day care," who sabotages her competition with fangs and plenty of pins.
Because live-action cartoons such as "Daddy Day Care" can't bear much scrutiny -- OK, none at all -- they paint themselves into corners through any encroachment of reality.
Kim (Regina King), for example. She's Charlie's lawyer-wife, but she's barely visible. The film might as well have made Charlie a recent widower because the way it's set up, Kim's input is conspicuously missing. In fact, so is Kim.
The guys do pick up an employee in former co-worker Marvin (Steve Zahn), whose animated way of relating to children is the first reason to believe that Daddy Day Care would survive beyond lunch, much less for months.
So what sustains the picture? You guessed it. Poo-poo jokes, messy urinating, flatulence, a kick in the crotch, several in the ankle and occasional name-calling.
Susan Marie O'Connor of Crafton, a day care worker who attended a preview showing, was put off by the emphasis on absurdities such as a child climbing draperies.
A day in day care is filled with nurturing and spontaneously funny moments, she said, not such unnecessarily outrageous stuff. "I had expected to laugh all through it," she added, "especially since it was an Eddie Murphy movie."
"Daddy Day Care" has amusing images and notions, but everything has been processed through the Hollywood blender that dictates shopworn gags.
Neither the direction by Steve Carr nor the screenplay by Geoff Rodkey finds what might be funny about guys in broccoli and carrot costumes, or grown men striking a balance between their inner child and the necessity of relating to their charges effectively.
It produces a wimpy child services inspector repeatedly, but we never get a sense of his requirements or what's done to satisfy them. Unless the picture was made exclusively for pre-schoolers, it shouldn't begrudge the rest of the audience a few bits of information on the sort of environment it says it's about.
And what's with the gratuitously anti-education message at the end?
"Daddy Day Care" is watchable, but more disposable than it needed to be.
