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Premise A contractor with a bizarre business plan complicates a man's attempt to move his new family to the suburbs. What We Say
Calling a sequel "Are We Done Yet?" is like calling it "Enough Already." The film in question follows up on "Are We There Yet?" (2005), in which a couple of vicious yet heartwarming "Home Alone"-inspired preteens made Ice Cube's courtship of Nia Long a living heck before the happy ending. This time Cube's character, Nick Persons, is fully in family comedy dad mode, having married Long and begun a new sports-themed magazine. Long's children are again played by young Philip Daniel Bolden and Aleisha Allen. Though the sequel never explains why they don't simply move into Nick's $60,000 Cadillac Escalade, the apartment they share (plus Long has twins on the way) cannot contain the hordes. So it's off to the Oregon countryside they go, to renovate a capacious fixer-upper. The blueprints are provided by the 1948 Cary Grant/Myrna Loy comedy "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House." No classic, "Mr. Blandings" nonetheless had a machine-tooled efficiency, and it didn't strain to please.
The whole of it feels written and directed by the Escalade's GPS. Steve Carr is the credited director; Hank Nelken is the credited writer, and together they grind through one "Money Pit" bit after another. John C. McGinley is over-exploited as the family's manic jack-of-all-trades contractor, who in this corner of Oregon (or Canada, substituting for Oregon; filming is cheaper there; their government believes in subsidies) serves also as the local real-estate agent and "part-time midwife." He nets some laughs, but as "Wild Hogs" recently proved, neither McGinley's vulpine grin nor his eccentric timing are material-proof.
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