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Cheaper by the Dozen

Steve Martin accepts a new coaching job, uprooting his wife and 12 children and moving to Chicago. Problems, merriment and family-values bromides ensue.

FILM FACTS

Starring: Steve Martin, Bonnie Hunt, Hilary Duff and Tom Welling
Director: Shawn Levy
Rating: PG for comic violence
Genre: Comedy, Family

Official movie site

See showtimes (PG) 98 minutes

Grade: C+

Verdict: Has about 12 good laughs (not all of them cheap) and a pleasant cast, but not much more.

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
Cox News Service

Taking the loose "Under the Tuscan Sun" approach to literary adaptation, about the only thing the new Steve Martin movie "Cheaper by the Dozen" has in common with the book and the 1950 movie is a title and the dozen kids. Otherwise, this is an uneven attempt to replicate the modest charms of an earlier Martin movie, "Parenthood," which also plopped the actor in the midst of domestic bliss/chaos.

Here, he's Tom Baker, a small-town football coach suddenly offered his dream job: the coaching position at his Division One college alma mater. But it means uprooting wife Kate (Bonnie Hunt) and the Bakers' dozen kids and moving them to Chicago. Problems, merriment and family-values bromides ensue.

The large family vs. career dilemma is reminiscent of "Meet Me in St. Louis," while Martin's fumbling efforts to do the laundry and the lunchboxes while Hunt is in New York for a book tour are straight out of "Mr. Mom." Plenty of movies - good movies - are derivative, but given the real story's charming turn-of-the-century setting and engaging, homespun problems (for instance, having your tonsils out), the contrived, patched-together plot seems especially unnecessary.

Along with the ever-likable Martin and the always good, always underused Hunt, the pleasant cast includes "Lizzie McGuire's" Hilary Duff, "Smallville's" Tom Welling and "Coyote Ugly's" Piper Perabo as three of the Baker kids, and Ashton Kutcher as Perabo's vain actor boyfriend. As a disapproving yuppie neighbor, Paula Marshall gets the best lines. Surveying the boisterous tumult across the street, she tsk's, "They're all going to end up on milk cartons."

There is a large audience for a movie like this, and I'm pretty certain that 98 percent of movie reviewers aren't it. "Cheaper by the Dozen" is comfortable the way a grilled cheese sandwich is comfortable. Which is just fine, but you can't help but wish that the audience for grilled-cheese movies could occasionally develop an appetite for something more filling.