This movie was perfectly pleasant.
Lucille Ball makes it, if anything does. Henry Fonda’s “I am so about the military” shtick got pretty old pretty quickly. It’s fine to make a character that cartoonishly into their one thing, but rather than make a bunch of gags about it, the persistence of his being about that one thing…was the gag. One long gag. One recurrent gag just over and over.
I was afraid this would be the kind of chaotic mess that was popularized in my youth and young adulthood. You know, movies whose target demo is kids, and whose big hat trick is “everything is zany and these adults just cAn’T CoNtRoL tHeSe cRaZy KiDs!” But, happily, this was more about the parents and had very little to do with their children, at least with regard to screen time.
It wasn’t my favorite, and I won’t go out of my way to see it again, but if I happen to have to share a room with it sometime in the future, I’ll consider it a welcome, pleasant, cozy situation.
This is a copy of the review on my Letterboxd profile. There, I rated it 6/10.
Candid Podcast Network 