Are We There Yet?

Road tripe: Are We There Yet? will have you asking if it's over yet

By Anthony Del Valle

Now that rap stars are starting to appear in family movies where they get all cuddly with cute kids and recite routine jokes that were old in Bob Hope's day, can it be long before "rap" becomes as quaint and reassuring as, say, a Bill Cosby sitcom? Or a Beach Boys album? Hey, even Ricky Nelson was once thought of as dangerous.

The point is Ice Cube is back. In director Bran Levant's Are We There Yet? he's a hot hunk (I kid you not) who hates kids. But single parent Suzanne Kingston (Nia Long) is so beautiful, he agrees, for reasons too dumb to recount here, to drive her two terrors (Aleisha Allen and Philip Daniel Bolden) from Oregon to British Columbia, where she will meet them. The kids don't want to share mama with any man, so they do all sorts of things to make his life hell. But--I hope I'm not spoiling things--it winds up he learns to see the nosewipes for the darling human beings they really are. And to add to the surprise, the kids wind up thinking Ice Cube is pretty swell after all. In the end, the babe, the Cube, and the two bad seeds are all aglow with happiness. We suspect the babe will not be a single mom for long.

The four credited screenwriters don't seem able to come up with the sort of situations that might make for legitimate comedy. They also don't seem aware of how unlikably manipulative they've written the character of Suzanne. The two kid actors read their lines as if they're mimicking a nauseatingly happy drama coach. And Ice Cube is just not romantic leading man material. He's more convincing in a barbershop than in a beautiful woman's bed.