Eddie Murphy and his young, impressionable friends have fun making another flop. |
Of course, it doesn't at first. When they open an at-home, presumably unlicensed daycare center, the children who attend act like the preschooler-as-rabid-gibbon archetype that keeps the vasectomy business afloat: They hit, scream, and break things and each other, and to top it off, have no control over their bodily functions. But instead of being caught on Nanny Cam throttling one of the beasties, Charlie and Phil are able to draw from a seemingly inexhaustible well of patience and understanding and soon have their youthful charges eating out of their hands. The taskmistress of the only other daycare center in town not under investigation by the feds, the very exclusive Chapman Academy, takes exception to this unexpected source of competition and decides to wage war. "I can't compete with fun," froths Anjelica Huston's Miss Harridan, a caricature of bitchiness who doesn't so much speak as spit venom, and doesn't so much walk as propel herself forward by the momentum of her dangerously waggling ass.
From start to finish, every unfunny gag is deadeningly familiar from its prior existence in dozens of other films with similar "underdogs who care versus the heartless but well-financed" themes, or carbon-copied "men tending to kids with wacky results" premises. And woe
DADDY DAY CARE Dir. Steve Carr; writ. Geoff Rodkey; feat. Eddie Murphy, Jeff Garlin, Anjelica Huston (PG) |
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