- Studio: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
- Release Date: Aug 3, 2012
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60The best of the lot. It's not great, but the mean-spiritedness that permeated the first film and stuck around a bit for the second is mostly gone.
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67Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days is probably the most inoffensive kid's film you're likely to see this summer. And that's a good thing.
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50Compared to the first two movie installments, this one is uncharacteristically scattershot in the life-lessons department.
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70Fox is smart to keep turning this stuff out before star Gordon grows too old for the role. He's terrific in a Leave it to Beaver way, perfectly capturing the angst of being in-betweener.
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38Here and there, in the father/son scenes, you see a glimmer of an honest interaction. All in all, I'd rather watch a "Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide" rerun.
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60Greg avoids the curse of the three in the third outing for the Wimpy Kid. Hardly groundbreaking but plenty of fun for its target audience.
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Aug 1, 201283Though often self-centered and conniving, Greg remains a likable kid, and the movie entertains by pulling off over-the-top scenarios that set up digestible life lessons for youngsters.
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Aug 2, 201250Ends the series' winning streak, or at least slows it down to a panting, dog-day crawl.
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60Director David Bowers' story is straightforwardly -- almost unimaginatively -- approached. But, armed with a talented cast and Kinney's chuckle-generating source material, it functions nicely as a sort of big-screen "Wonder Years" for Millennials.
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40Unlike last year's superior "Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer" - which put its grade-school heroine through similarly seasonal woes - "Dog Days" squanders several chances to find something magical in the mundane.
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25I'd call Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days harmless if it weren't for some totally unnecessary gay-panic jokes that could actually encourage bullying.
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50A half-hearted morality tale about taking responsibility for your actions as a sign of impending maturity.
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67Genial and pleasant to a fault, the film could benefit from a little more personality.
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60It's perfectly workable popcorn entertainment for the school holidays.
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70Oroves nimbler and truer to its origins than last year's "Rodrick Rules."
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50The film is more a patched-together collection of anecdotes than a coherent story, and some of Greg's tribulations, like fear over a high dive and an amusement-park ride, don't seem age-appropriate for a boy who has just finished seventh grade.
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Aug 5, 201260Viewers enduring early adolescence or those grappling with its psychic scars will recognize the honesty in the comic humiliation.
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60Childminders rejoice: the formulaic but family-friendly series is back and it's business as usual.
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63Maintains the franchise's knack for getting kids right.
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Aug 2, 201260Formulaic in adhering to the sitcom-style tone of the first two films, picture finds the chronically underappreciated Greg facing a summer break replete with parental expectations and anxiety over his first crush.
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70It's the latest installment in what now forms a lightly likable trilogy of films based on Jeff Kinney's Wimpy Kid books.
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Aug 2, 201275It really captures what it feels like to be a kid.