Yours, Mine & Ours (2005) [Special Collector’s Edition – Widescreen] – DVD
½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C-
starring Dennis Quaid, Rene Russo, Rip Torn, Linda Hunt
screenplay by Ron Burch & David Kidd, based on the screenplay by Melville Shavelson and Mort Lachman
directed by Raja Gosnell
by Walter Chaw Hand it to deal-with-the-devil Raja Gosnell's Yours, Mine & Ours, a worthless update of the mostly worthless Henry Fonda/Lucille Ball original: at least it hurries up and cranks Admiral Frank (Dennis Quaid) and hippie-chick Helen (Rene Russo) into holy matrimony. But then, it's not about the parents–it's about getting covered in goop and obnoxious kid gags, so once we jettison the only two possible reasons to see this shipwreck (ignoring poor Rip Torn and Linda Hunt in perfunctory supporting roles), we're offered eighteen adorable reasons to open our wrists and tie our tubes. You know the drill: disgusting food jokes, barf jokes, fart and poop and piss and pet jokes, sped-up moments, weird references to The Parent Trap, and then the obligatory soupy plot machinations that get the arch-enemy family camps to join forces to manufacture a feel-good throb of family against all odds. As Robert Altman himself couldn't work a miracle with these twenty-two main characters (eighteen of them pre-adolescent), maybe it's not fair to expect Gosnell to conjure something watchable from this infernal clips reel of children screaming–but one did have the reasonable expectation that he wouldn't twice humiliate Quaid in silly-noise-augmented slapstick scenarios.