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75Lighthearted fun.
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It's not just a feel-good holiday movie, though audiences, especially youngsters, will certainly walk out of it feeling good.
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75Cheaper entertains a broad audience by recalling an age of family filmmaking when that term wasn’t synonymous with crap.
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75Equal parts fantasy and cautionary tale, a film that manages to be uplifting and off-putting simultaneously -- fortunately, more the former than the latter.
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75Martin and Hunt are exactly the right lively but not sticky authority figures to keep the house (and the comedy pace) bouncing.
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63Isn't without charm, or laughs. Director Shawn Levy's film features some of the best child actor casting since "The Little Rascals."
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60Solidifying his funnyman rep, Ashton Kutcher appears as oldest child Piper Perabo's model-actor boyfriend, a delightfully brainless narcissist.
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60Something of a shambles -- a shambles about a shambles -- but bound for big success and deservedly so.
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60Be forewarned: this comedy bears only the faintest resemblance to the classic book and film of the same name.
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50Thanks to Martin and Hunt, who both have a seemingly casual flair for mining laughs from even the most generic lines of dialogue, Cheaper by the Dozen works better than it might have in less capable hands, but even they're challenged by some of the picture's forced mood swings.
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50Soft, sentimental, and as unlike real family life as you can get.
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50If only director Shawn Levy and the screenwriters had gone for cute and interesting instead of dull and cloyingly sentimental.
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50Much as I adore Martin and Hunt, whose matching tongue-in-cheek delivery and finite patience make them seem more like siblings than spouses, their movie is indistinguishable from an Afterschool Special.
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50Makes one long for Martin's edgy work in films such as "The Spanish Prisoner."
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50Martin puts a thankless gloss on the antic role he played in "Parenthood." As his wife, Hunt is the movie's saving grace.
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50Much of the film feels like watching "Home Alone" and "Mr. Mom" on 12 different TVs at once.
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50As synthetic as a plastic Christmas tree.
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50An unobjectionable if uninspired updating of a classic family story for the minivan generation.
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50This is a movie that knows its audience and realizes it doesn't need much of a story to hit that audience, literally, where it lives.
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42Resembles nothing more than an overstuffed, undernourished "Brady Bunch" episode, only not as funny.
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40Generally amusing -- if occasionally overly sentimental.
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40The film works best when it taps into the chaos generated by the kids, and there are a number of suitably anarchic Home Alone-style set-pieces.
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40Nobody here, especially Martin, looks as if he's having much fun, apart from a dizzy cameo by Ashton Kutcher as oldest daughter Piper Perabo's model-actor beau, riffing heavy-handedly on his pretty-boy image, and loving it.
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40Unfortunately knows no tone between schmaltzy/gooey and slapstick/gross-out. Pic is as far from the original pic and its autobiographical memoir source as it can be while retaining the same title.
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38There is not a frame of "Cheaper" that doesn't feel contrived. It fails the most fundamental test of movie logic.
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38Can be summed up by the fact that Ashton Kutcher, making a glorified cameo as a narcissistic model-slash-actor, is the best thing in it.
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30Everyone learns a lesson by movie’s end: Don’t put work before family. Curiously, no one learns that all this could have been avoided with a good method of birth control.
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30Nothing happens. At all. Ever. Remember when Steve Martin was funny? Apparently, neither does he.
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30A bubbling crockpot of farcical mush to warm the tummies of anyone who really and truly misses "The Brady Bunch," and I mean really and truly.
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25The same studio has aimed a remake at the same family market. Translation: The once-modest piece has been redesigned as a vehicle (a lumbering SUV) for Steve Martin, stripped of any vestigial charm, and then thrown into neutral, where its manic engine does nothing but roar loudly and pointlessly for the duration.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 38 out of 57
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Mixed: 5 out of 57
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Negative: 14 out of 57
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Its tediously boring. Martin doesn't let himself go manic the way he should when dealing with all the kids.
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8