Yours, Mine & Ours

No surprises here, folks. Yours, Mine & Ours is your basic family drama/"comedy" wherein a zillion kids are up to shenanigans while their parents try to work out their cookie-cutter differences in time for a heart-warming ending. With like, a basquillion kids.

Frank Beardsley (Dennis Quaid) and Helen White (Rene Russo), once high school sweethearts, each find themselves recently widowed with an entire litter of children. Frank and his 8 kids have just moved yet again, this time to Frank's hometown of New London. As an admiral in the U.S. Coast Guard, Frank has stereotypically brought his regimented military lifestyle into the family's routine as well--training all of his kids to "sound off" and perform all sorts of other military family cliches. Helen, meanwhile, is the exact opposite--letting her children shriek incessantly and run wild around the house, and in general make a mess of things. Thankfully, the movie wastes little time with the reunion and subsequent rekindling of romance between Frank and Helen, but the news of their impromptu wedding is not quite what their children wanted to hear. Despite the fact that both Helen and Frank are blissfully happy together and perfectly wonderful to their new stepchildren, both the White kids and the Beardsley kids decide that the marriage must be destroyed. I mean, they are all so different! William (the eldest Beardsley) and Dylan (the eldest White) have a difference of opinion as to how their room will be decorated, as do the two eldest girls of the respective families. Clearly these are irreconcilable differences and therefore befitting of the plan to rip out their parents' hearts by destroying a happy marriage. Touching.

At first, the kids declare war on each other, by mixing up the bathroom schedules (haha!) and then setting off the fire alarm in order to evacuate the offending clan. Unfortunately for the kids, however, Frank and Helen keep planning all manner of bonding activities in order to encourage peace, but all to no avail. The kids decide to unite against their common enemy and, again, break their parents' hearts in the process, by setting up various hijinks that will highlight the glaringly obvious differences in personality. Ah, I love these hijinks--what clever little strategies will those kids come up with next? Meanwhile, as Frank tells Helen a little story about the creatively-named "Beautiful Lighthouse Keeper," the audience is slapped repeatedly in the face with the fact that this story will almost certainly come into play at the end when drastic measures must be taken to save the marriage. As the blatant personality differences between Frank and Helen are slowly discovered by the same, the marriage begins to suffer just as the kids begin to get along. Literally no one is surprised by any of these developments.

This movie wasn't horrible, but it wasn't uproariously funny or noteworthy for anything other than having a freaking ton of kids. There were a few, brief moments that brought a smile to my face, but the story was so ridiculously predictable that it was hard to be surprised or entertained. It's probably a cute movie for parents and kids alike, but otherwise I can't recommend it. I do suggest waiting for the DVD at the very least, because while Yours, Mine & Ours is a harmless and easy-going film, it's certainly nothing remarkable.