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20The kids are charmless, the writing is bland, and the embarrassing jokes sound like nails down a blackboard.
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50Parental Guidance is one of those intergenerational embarrassment comedies in the "Meet the Fockers" line, where children can enjoy seeing grown-ups looking ridiculous.
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50The pathos: considerable. The sight gags, involving Crystal puking chili dog on a kid's face, or the grandson with an imaginary friend peeing and causing an X Games skateboarder to wipe out: artless. The results: tolerably amusing.
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75Parental Guidance is an engaging comedy that bridges multiple generation gaps, making it that rare movie that grandparents, their kids, and their kids can enjoy.
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25Parental Guidance kicks off with a mean-spirited joke about an overweight woman and heads downhill from there.
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12It's hard to know who exactly Parental Guidance was made for.
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60Crystal and Midler are such confident pros that their crack timing elevates even substandard material.
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50In the occasionally funny but mostly facile '80s-style culture-clash comedy Parental Guidance, Billy Crystal, who now resembles a very cute puffer fish, plays Artie Decker.
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40I can't deny I did feel fonder of my own family afterward, mostly because I know none of them would ever make me sit through Parental Guidance.
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50It could be worse, and would be without Bette Midler or Marisa Tomei.
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Dec 26, 201240Lazy, smugly self-satisfied movie.
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50Perhaps anticipating an older audience, most of the lessons are one-sided, with the old-timers seemingly harming the children while actually saving them.
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50Parental Guidance is overly generous with regard to the silliness. However, it's not clueless. Crystal seems determined to give as generously as he gets. When a bully whacks him, Crystal covers the bully in vomit. Good for him.
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Dec 26, 201240The actors deserve credit for the professionalism they bring to this stinker, especially Tomei, who plays it straight as a contemporary have-it-all-or-die-trying mom, and Midler, who's given little to do, but works up an amusing backstory about her days as a good-time gal on the evening news.
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16Parental Guidance is the abysmal grandpa/grandkids bonding comedy he's (Crystal) been destined to make since he first started creating new comedy with an unmistakable old-person smell.
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60This is the first time in ages some of the old stand-up Crystal shows through, flashes of quick wit instead of Borscht-belt antics. Not to the extent that it used to in such movies as "When Harry Met Sally ..." (which was, ahem, 23 years ago). But better than you'd expect...Just like the movie.
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38The movie spends too much time wedging the couple into a May-December moment, where Crystal cracks nostalgic about the good old days. It's sweet, but it grows old.
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50Billy Crystal and Bette Midler hustle to peddle the threadbare material that makes Andy Fickman's comedy a perfectly tolerable, if uninspired, moviegoing experience.
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40The execution, alas, prevents this from being a genuine crowdpleaser, with the better moments (mostly of the schmaltzy variety) more than offset by the irritating and tedious ones.
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Dec 23, 201212Andy Fickman's comedy offers a confused and flat portrayal of generational differences.