| 75 |
Entertainment Weekly
Martin and Hunt are exactly the right lively but not sticky authority figures to keep the house (and the comedy pace) bouncing.
|
| 75 |
Chicago Sun-Times
Lighthearted fun.
|
| 75 |
San Francisco Chronicle
Ruthe Stein
It's not just a feel-good holiday movie, though audiences, especially youngsters, will certainly walk out of it feeling good.
|
| 75 |
Baltimore Sun
Equal parts fantasy and cautionary tale, a film that manages to be uplifting and off-putting simultaneously -- fortunately, more the former than the latter.
|
| 75 |
Premiere
Sara Brady
Cheaper entertains a broad audience by recalling an age of family filmmaking when that term wasn’t synonymous with crap.
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| 63 |
Chicago Tribune
Isn't without charm, or laughs. Director Shawn Levy's film features some of the best child actor casting since "The Little Rascals."
|
| 60 |
Village Voice
Solidifying his funnyman rep, Ashton Kutcher appears as oldest child Piper Perabo's model-actor boyfriend, a delightfully brainless narcissist.
|
| 60 |
Chicago Reader
Be forewarned: this comedy bears only the faintest resemblance to the classic book and film of the same name.
|
| 60 |
Wall Street Journal
Something of a shambles -- a shambles about a shambles -- but bound for big success and deservedly so.
|
| 50 |
Christian Science Monitor
Soft, sentimental, and as unlike real family life as you can get.
|
| 50 |
Miami Herald
Christine Dolen
If only director Shawn Levy and the screenwriters had gone for cute and interesting instead of dull and cloyingly sentimental.
|
| 50 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Much of the film feels like watching "Home Alone" and "Mr. Mom" on 12 different TVs at once.
|
| 50 |
Washington Post
An unobjectionable if uninspired updating of a classic family story for the minivan generation.
|
| 50 |
Washington Post
This 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.
|
| 50 |
Washington Post
This 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.
|
| 50 |
Boston Globe
Martin puts a thankless gloss on the antic role he played in "Parenthood." As his wife, Hunt is the movie's saving grace.
|
| 50 |
Los Angeles Times
As synthetic as a plastic Christmas tree.
|
| 50 |
The Hollywood Reporter
Thanks 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.
|
| 50 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
Much 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.
|
| 50 |
USA Today
Makes one long for Martin's edgy work in films such as "The Spanish Prisoner."
|
| 42 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Resembles nothing more than an overstuffed, undernourished "Brady Bunch" episode, only not as funny.
|
| 40 |
LA Weekly
Nobody 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.
|
| 40 |
TV Guide
Generally amusing -- if occasionally overly sentimental.
|
| 40 |
Variety
Unfortunately 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.
|
| 40 |
Empire
Niall MacPherson
The 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.
|
| 38 |
New York Daily News
There is not a frame of "Cheaper" that doesn't feel contrived. It fails the most fundamental test of movie logic.
|
| 38 |
New York Post
Can 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.
|
| 30 |
Dallas Observer
Nothing happens. At all. Ever. Remember when Steve Martin was funny? Apparently, neither does he.
|
| 30 |
The New York Times
A 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.
|
| 30 |
Austin Chronicle
Everyone 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.
|
| 25 |
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
The 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.
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