Robert Kimmel Smith’s 1984 young reader’s novel is a parable about the perils of escalation, when a grieving widower moves in with his daughter’s family, forcing 10-year-old Peter to surrender his beloved bedroom and move into the attic.
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| Believing they've declared a truce during his young granddaughter's Christmas-themed birthday party, Ed (Robert De Niro, right) offers a cookie to his grandson Peter (Oakes Fegley). |
The subsequent “declaration of war” involves gentle, low-level pranks, such as wrongly set alarm clocks and hidden slippers. Grandpa, initially distressed, reluctantly responds in kind; Peter’s toothbrush and schoolbooks go missing. Realizing that the situation threatens to escalate uncomfortably, Grandpa has a heart-to-heart with Peter, using Pearl Harbor to demonstrate that, ultimately, both sides lose in a war.
Although not entirely convinced, Peter orchestrates one more prank before realizing that he has, indeed, gone too far. He and Grandpa reconcile, put their heads together, and devise a win-win solution that pleases the entire family.
You won’t be surprised to learn that Hollywood “goes too far” with this big-screen adaptation, opening today at operational movie theaters. Director Tim Hill frequently yields to exaggerated slapstick, while scripters Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember have turned many of Smith’s mild-mannered characters into two-dimensional burlesques.
The result is an overly broad comedy that only barely retains the essential moral of Smith’s book.
Yes, Hill’s film is laugh-out-loud funny at times; more often than not, though, we’re dealing with the sort of destructive overkill that turned so many 1970s Disney comedies into eye-rolling disasters.
Ed (Robert De Niro) leaves his home reluctantly, not wanting to surrender his independence. The reference to his departed wife is retained via a brief, wistful glance at a photograph, and thereafter ceases to be a plot point. Ed joins the household containing his daughter Sally (Uma Thurman), her husband Arthur (Rob Riggle), and their three children: teenage daughter Mia (Laura Marano), Peter (Oakes Fegley) and 4-year-old Jennifer (Poppy Gagnon).
Ed is given Peter’s room; the latter is bumped upstairs, into the attic. (Mind you, every kid I knew — myself included — would have killed to have an attic room. But to each his own, I guess.) The situation might have remained stable, except that Peter is goaded into action against the “room robber” by his sixth-grade posse: Emma (T.J. McGibbon), Billy (Juliocesar Chavez) and Steve (Isaac Kragten).
