November 23, 2005 | During last year’s holiday movie season, you could catch a fleeting glimpse of Dennis Quaid subbing for James Stewart in director John Moore’s remake of Flight of the Phoenix. (Fleeting, that is, because the nifty adventure flick was seriously underrated by critics and generally ignored by audiences.) This year, he’s filling in for Henry Fonda in yet another remake, Yours, Mine & Ours. To pay Quaid the highest imaginable compliment: He’s once again a more-than-worthy replacement for a legendary star. And again, he’s in a remake slightly better than the original.
Although it’s a little overzealous in its hard-sell slapstick, the new Yours, Mine & Ours is genuinely pleasant family-friendly fare. It helps a lot that the comedy has Rene Russo, one of the more appealing actresses in contemporary cinema. (Not nearly active enough, mind you, but she’s always nice to have around.) It helps even more that the original 1968 comedy was, despite the stellar presence of Fonda and Lucille Ball, no big deal. Director Raja Gosnell (Never Been Kissed) didn’t have to worry about being unfavorably compared to a classic. All he had to do was make a reasonably entertaining movie that could stand on its own merits. He has.
Screenwriters Ron Burch and David Kidd waste little time in establishing their premise, which they’ve enhanced with multicultural themes. Widowed U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Frank Beardsley (Quaid) is a loving but strict taskmaster who uses military-style discipline to keep his eight children in line. But widowed handbag-designer Helen North (Russo), who comes off as an unreconstructed hippie, takes a more laissez-faire approach to raising her 10 kids (including a rainbow coalition of adopted Indian, Asian and African-American youngsters).
Thirty years after their teenage romance, the opposites attract again when Frank moves back to his home base of New London, Conn. So attracted are they, in fact, that they marry almost immediately — without telling their kids.
It’s no surprise when the youngsters greet the news with less-than-unbridled enthusiasm. Since money is never a pressing concern in this kind of sitcom fantasy, Frank and Helen can easily afford a spacious seaside fixer-upper (complete with lighthouse) for their combined family. It’s more difficult for the couple to strike a balance between their wildly divergent child-rearing philosophies. And it’s practically impossible for the two sets of children to get along.
All the kids have in common is their dislike of the new domestic set-up. So, of course, they strike a wary truce to sabotage their parents’ chances of happily-ever-aftering.
To generate laughs, Gosnell relies heavily on chaotic scenes of squabbling punctuated with paint-tossing, water-hosing and destruction of property. (A pet pig figures too prominently in the action.) On the other hand, the director wisely refrains from caricature. Quaid never goes overboard as a Coast Guard lifer, and Russo keeps Helen’s free-spiritedness from curdling into cloying excess. With little obvious effort, the charismatic stars use their low-key charm to generate a rooting interest in keeping the couple (and their respective offspring) under the same roof.
Given their numbers, it’s hard for any of the children to stand out. Even so, there’s great work by Katija Pevec and Danielle Panabaker as teenage stepsisters who take an instant dislike to each other, and Sean Faris as Frank’s unapologetically straight-arrow son. Among the grown-ups in the supporting cast, Linda Hunt earns a couple of mild chuckles as a caustic housekeeper, but Rip Torn (as Frank’s commander) and Jerry O’Connell (as Helen’s business rep) are employed primarily as window dressing.
