PLOT: A widow with 10 children marries a widower with 8 children. Food fight! The end.
Yours, Mine & Ours is the story of a blended family with 18 children. We saw the film with a couple of critics, aged 11; one pronounced the movie better than Cheaper By The Dozen and the other said it wasn't as good as Cheaper By The Dozen. This should provide a fairly good guide to the involved film territory.
To begin at the beginning, there really was a Helen Eileen Beardsley, a widow with eight children who married a widower with 10 children. She and he then had two more kids together -- hence the yours, the mine and the ours of the title. Try to keep up.
Beardsley's book, Who Gets The Drumstick? was made into a movie in 1968 called Yours, Mine & Ours. The original film starred Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda.
The remake of Yours, Mine & Ours stars Dennis Quaid as a Coast Guard honcho whose home is run with military precision. He has eight children who call him commander and obey all rules. The house is shipshape, and so forth.
He encounters his highschool sweetheart, played by Rene Russo. She's a hippie handbag designer with 10 children. Her house is messy and fun. Quaid and Russo marry. His conservative children despise her free-roaming children, and vice-versa. (There are no "ours" in this movie, just some lame dialogue to get past it.)
The kids sabotage a big house restoration and then collude to destroy their parents' new relationship. What jolly fun.
Russo widens her eyes and laughs. Quaid narrows his eyes and frowns. Various unattractive child actors deliver uninspired dialogue. The family has a pet pig, some dogs and a small furry thing, all of whom get far too much screen time.
Strangely, Yours, Mine & Ours has cameos from Rip Torn, Linda Hunt and Jerry O'Connell, which suggests that the movie may have begun as one thing and ended up as quite another.
The director, Raja Gosnell, is the auteur responsible for the Scooby-Doo movies, Big Momma's House and Home Alone 3. Enough said.
BOTTOM LINE: Do we have to spell this out for you? Crap. Horrible crap. Not-funny-even-once crap. The worst part is, time accelerates with age, so instead of waiting 30-odd years to remake a film from their childhood, baby boomers will start to retread this crap even faster and The Parent Trap and The Love Bug will come back again and this movie could return in as little as five years, maybe with Ashton Kutcher as the dad and Britanny Murphy as the mom, and then we'd all have to put our heads in the microwave and never, ever, ever go to the movies again.
(This film is rated G)
