If you remember anything you learned in middle school English, you’ve probably noticed that almost the entire opening paragraph of this article is one, long run-on sentence. It’s only appropriate to describe R.V.—one long run-on. It attempts to go from point A to point B without stopping to let the characters develop naturally or to let the audience really appreciate the story’s quirkiness. It’s full of silly “bathroom” humor, and it glosses over several opportunities at real intelligent wit. Even some of the older Chris Farley or Adam Sandler movies had little glimpses of smart comedy; that’s why those movies are remembered, and most people will have forgotten all about R.V. by July. R.V. begins as Bob Munro (Robin Williams) tries to get his 5-year-old daughter, Cassie (Joanna ‘Jojo’ Levesque, also in Aquamarine this year), to settle down for bed, in the only cute scene in the movie. She tells him that she never wants to get married because it would mean that she’d have to leave him. He assures her that they’ll always be best friends, no matter what. The movie stops being cute and suddenly it flashes forward ten years. Cassie now hates her dad, she has an annoying ten-year-old brother, and her parents don’t get along anymore.

Bob drags his family—and Cassie’s friend Gretchen—to an office party, where Gretchen throw a cup of grease on Bob’s boss Todd Mallory (Will Arnett) for selling his company’s soda products to schools and contributing to “the fat of our youth.” As punishment, Todd forces Bob to give a presentation to a company in Boulder, Colorado. The only problem is that the Munros had been planning a trip to Hawaii that week. Not wanting to disappoint his family Bob rents an R.V. and takes the family on a road trip to Lake Nirvana in order to cover up the fact that it’s really a business trip. Along the way, they meet the Gornicke family, a perky bunch of nomads who travel across the country in a big bus and perform in county fairs.
The saddest part about the whole movie is that the story sounds really funny. Geoff Rodkey—writer of The Shaggy Dog and Daddy Daycare, as well as MTV’s Beavis and Butthead—gave us this screenplay. He started with a good premise, but he ruined it by using types instead of real, thinking, feeling characters. For example, Bob Munro is the dad that works too much and has no time for his family. His wife, Jamie (Cheryl Hines), is the selfish trophy wife. Cassie is the socially conscious, liberal, vegetarian L.A. teenager. The son, Carl, is the rich white kid that acts like a gangster and listens to rap. These people aren’t endearing. They don’t change much by the end of the movie. They only learn to get along in the end because the script tells them to.

Most of the actors in the film do pretty well with what they were given. Robin Williams, however, just seems to have hit the bottom of his career. He hit his peak in the early nineties with Aladdin and.Toys. Ever since then, he just hasn’t been funny. To me, he’s like the ADHD kid in school who can’t stand it if people aren’t constantly watching him. He gets everyone to laugh at first, but after the tenth or eleventh time of doing the same jokes, he gets a chuckle here and there and the teacher sends him to the principle. Robin Williams is truly a gifted comedian, but his gifts are limited, and we don’t need anymore.

Jeff Daniels, on the other hand, is the only person in this movie that really seemed to get a good laugh from the audience. He plays Travis Gornicke, the father of the overly-friendly family that the Munros hate. For example, there’s a moment when Travis introduces his family to everyone. He gets to his daughter and says that her name is Moon. Bob asks if she’s their hippie love-child, and after giving a priceless half-confused, half-disgusted look, Travis proclaims, “No! She’s named after Houston Oilers quarterback, Warren Moon.” Of course, you have to credit the writer with the line, but Daniels’ delivery makes it funny. The thing that makes him different than Robin Williams is that Travis Gornicke is a completely different character from, say, Harry Dunne from Dumb & Dumber; and Bob Munro is basically the same guy as Daniel Hillard in Mrs. Doubtfire or John Keating in Dead Poets Society.

I think that since the movie is called R.V, I should probably spend a little time discussing the R.V. in the movie. This thing seems like it should have been in a Stephen King horror flick, rather than a summer family movie. It’s loaded with more gags and plot devices than one of James Bond’s Aston Martins. First of all it has the words “Rent Me!” painted in huge letters on the side so that everyone will know that the Munros are a bunch of highfalutin city folks trying to rough it, as if the audience needs to have this reinforced over and over. Okay, we get it. It has a fold-out awning on the side only for the sole purpose of getting torn off when Bob tries to make a fast getaway from the Gornickes. It has a malfunctioning toilet that sprays Bob with sewage. Its parking brake doesn’t work. And a family of raccoons lives in the oven. The two Munro kids call it the “big rolling turd.” If I’d rented that thing, I’d probably have a bunch of other, more colorful names for it. It’s too far-fetched, even for a Robin Williams movie.

To sum it up, R.V. is another “just when things couldn’t get any worse . . .” movie, and it’s ironic because as more and more of those movies come out, they get worse and worse. I do, however, think that kids might like it. There’s enough slapstick and bathroom humor to get them rolling. The worst part is that it ranked #1 in its opening weekend and gross over $16 million, while a truly great and uplifting family film like Akeelah and the Bee opened in eighth place and brought in less than half the money. I give this movie one-and-a-half out of five Bees. Let’s just hope that R.V. isn’t a prediction of what’s to come this summer.