Release Date: April 7, 2004
Starring: Cedric the Entertainer, Vanessa L. Williams, Solange Knowles, Bow Wow, Gabby Soleil, Steve Harvey, Shannon Elizabeth
Directed by: Christopher Erskin
Written by: Todd R. Jones, Earl Richey Jones
Distributed by: Fox Searchlight Pictures
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (some sexual references, crude humor, brief drug material)
I think that screenwriters like road trip movies because they practically write themselves. The genre is not bounded by any of the rules of real life. Anything can happen (and it often does). And when things get old, you just have to pack the characters into their car (or truck, or RV, or school bus) and put them on the road again. All you need is a departure city, a destination, marginally entertaining characters, and a very judicious editor. Luckily, Johnson Family Vacation has all of those.
The Johnson family of the title is headed up by Nate (Cedric the Entertainer) and Dorothy (Vanessa L. Williams), and, along with their three children -- incessantly talky Nikki (Solange Knowles), would-be rap star D.J. (Bow Wow), and too-adorable Destiny (Gabby Soleil) -- they’re on the road from Los Angeles to Caruthersville, Missouri, for their family’s annual reunion.
There are catches, of course. Nate and Dorothy have been separated for three months, and have only decided to go on this trip because of their daughter Destiny’s birthday -- though Nate secretly hopes that he will be able to win the “Family of the Year” trophy from his older brother Mack (Steve Harvey) in a talent show contest to be held at the reunion.
And the family’s car -- Nate’s metallic-burgundy Lincoln Navigator (an SUV that he and several other characters amusingly refer to as a truck) -- has accidentally been given an overhaul at the auto shop, and is now decked out with a flashy, Burberry-inspired interior, ghetto-fabulous rotating hubcaps, and a number of other amenities. Nate, who is a dead ringer for a closeted control freak, is furious.
Indeed, the funniest part about Johnson Family Vacation is watching Cedric the Entertainer, whom audiences will know from his standup routines and his immensely likeable, outspoken character from the Barbershop movies, play it straight. He does get a chance to cut up later, when he plays another Johnson family member, the lascivious mechanic Uncle Earl, but for the most part he delivers all of his jokes deadpan (he tells his son to give up his dreams of becoming a rapper because it’s a career without a 401(k) or health insurance).
The trip doesn’t go smoothly, either. Nate gets run off the road by a semi truck in Arizona, tricked into visiting an Indian casino in Colorado, and arrested for littering in Kansas. Somewhere along the way he also picks up a hitchhiker (Shannon Elizabeth) who may or may not be a distant family member but also turns out to be a witch of sorts. And he also has to contend with his children and his wife; this is very much a guy movie, in which life is just an obstacle that separates a man from the road.
Most of the humor does go smoothly, thanks in part to Cedric the Entertainer’s affable screen presence. While the film contains very few side-splitting laughers, it does prove that Cedric has the talent to carry a movie -- if only as the head of an ensemble cast, because it gives him more characters to play off.
The bits of humor that don’t work involve some of the movie’s running jokes, which are poorly developed. In one, Nate is told he must keep his SUV in pristine condition if he wants to return it to the auto shop after the trip is over; needless to say, this doesn’t go as planned, but the joke is dropped long before it gets a chance to be any fun. And the rivalry between Nate and his older brother Mack is poorly developed (except for one scene where the two brothers say grace before a meal and end up firing insults at each other) -- nothing more than a holdover from the days when Cedric and Harvey used to trade jokes on TV’s “The Steve Harvey Show.”
But, thanks to some competent editing (it seems as though no scene is allowed to go on for longer than three minutes) the film clocks in at a very palatable 100 minutes, and a twist at the end gives Johnson Family Vacation a wholesome quality, despite the PG-13 rating for sex and drug references. If Cedric the Entertainer is intent on breaking out of the character-actor mold, then he chose a good place to start.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)