R V

So, that's the single redeeming quality of the otherwise shitacular RV; the people who don't go can stay home and rifle through those who do stuff. Seriously, they deserve it for going to see this unimaginative, joyless crap. Hell, there is better unimaginative, joyless crap in the john at the Elk Lodge after a pancake breakfast. And it's free! Honestly, you don't even have to buy the pancakes or the tarry, black pancakes. You can just walk in, sort of saunter back toward the bathrooms, go in and look. They have never charged me anything.

Robin Williams takes another tumble down the career staircase in RV. He had already descended to the landing between ground level and the basement after playing a retarded janitor in House of D. Now he trips the rest of the way, landing face first in the root cellar, head cracked open and teeth smashed to hell. Figuratively, I mean. Not literally. Literally, that happened to the Harelip last week, which is why the imagery is fresh in my mind. She came directly from her fall to the Tavern and started talking with her mouth full of foamy Budweiser and blood.

In , Williams is a middle-aged marketing executive afraid that some young gun will steal his job. At home, his teen kids are indifferent to him, and his work stress has made him unpleasant and harried. Well, more unpleasant. To please his smarmy, unpleasant, evil boss, he agrees to do a presentation in Colorado during a time he'd already committed to a long overdue Hawaiian family vacation.

After renting a massive motor home, Williams tells his family they need to spend more together time, and that he has decided on an RV vacation instead of Hawaii. Naturally, the family hates the idea. And naturally, Williams takes out trees, bricks and awnings with the motor home. And then there are the running gags about shit in the RVs tank and, strangely, a seatbelt that locks up. Even more bizarre is a scene where he calls a man named "Irv " by the name "Saul." I have no idea what the punchline is there, or whether it was a running gag so fucking bad they edited most of it out. I doubt that theory, though, because the gags they left in are so fucking rancid that there's no lower limit to what they'd keep. who knows? Maybe there's a scene of a child being raped in a gas station bathroom they decided wasn't quite right. But I bet that was a tough call.

Along the way to Colorado, Williams and family encounter such hilarity as one other wacky motor-homing family, difficulty connecting to the Internet, and faulty brakes that mean that any time things get slow the motor home rolls down a hill. He also reconnects with his whiny son and daughter, and with his completely nondescript wife. More importantly, by reconnecting he learns that working for an evil boss is bad, and he gives a rousing speech in Colorado declaring that he quits and that he rediscovered his soul, etc, etc.

What a fucking crock of shit. RV is so damn formulaic they might as well feed it to babies. Hell, it's already lukewarm. It's the same fucking story of the dissatisfied suburban dad who must go on a journey to discover himself and that his family is what really matters. Does anyone know a dad who this really happened to? Yeah, some might change for a little while, but total transformation? I remember Worm down at the Tavern vowed to learn all his kids' names after he broke his dick and got arrested for humping a fire hydrant. He did, too, for the brats from his first two wives. Two weeks later, though, he was back to humping fire hydrants and calling his kids shitstains. This life-changing journey stuff is generally bullshit, but in the hands of Hollywood hacks like Geoff Rodkey and Barry Sonnenfeld, it's worse. It's pureed bullshit: same awful taste, just more processed. Like something with wheatgrass in it from Jamba Juice. Rodkey is the ultimate in unimaginative grassfuckers; he also wrote The Shaggy Dog, which is the same God damn story of an overworked dad rediscovering his estranged kids through hardship. They both even have the same heavy reliance on corny sight gags. In Dog it was talking animals. Here it's shit getting run over by the runaway motor home, over and over and over. You've gotta have the imagination of an asswart to rely so heavily on such lame-ass gags. Or on the sort of emotion and resolutions that come in Hallmark cards. Seriously, it takes no effort and no creativity to wrap up this shit with solutions like Williams quitting his job because his kids taught him to believe in himself, only to immediately be given a better job by people who respect his newly found integrity.

The movie is as toothless as the keynote speaker at an American Legion Convention. It tries to be nice to everyone, and it isn't clever enough to make anyone unique. Basically, we're stuck with a bunch of bland people doing shit we've seen before, except in a motor home. In other words, like camping with my parents.

I wouldn't pay ten bucks to do that, and you shouldn't pay ten to do this. One Finger for RV. I wish I could call it a new low for weak-ass formula story-telling, but it's not. It's right down there with the rest of them, looking up at our asses and picking our pockets.