An overworked Bob Munro, his wife Jaime, their 15-year-old daughter Cassie and 12-year-old son Carl are in desperate need of some quality time together. After promising to take them on a family vacation in Hawaii, Bob abruptly changes plans without telling them. Instead of a week in a tropical paradise, they're going on a road trip to Colorado in a recreational vehicle. Dragging his wife and kids kicking and screaming into the RV, Bob's togetherness plan (which is partly a ruse to keep him from losing his job) almost immediately hits a major speed bump. Everything that can go wrong, does. Bob's lame attempts to navigate the unwieldy, oversized vehicle are met with silence and scorn from his resentful family. The RV life is a far cry from their comfortable life in Los Angeles, and every attempt Bob makes to get them into the spirit of the vacation threatens to tear them further apart. At an RV camp, the Munro family is befriended by the Gornicke family--an irritatingly endearing happy-go-lucky clan of full-time RVers. The more they try to elude the Gornickes, the more their paths seem destined to cross. But adversity has a way of uniting even the most dysfunctional family members and each setback the Munros experience inadvertently helps them become a true family again.

It’s been awhile since Robin Williams did the kind of movie that made him famous, that of the slapstick hijinks comedy where anything that can go wrong does. I think its safe to safe to say that maybe he should have waited a little bit longer to return to his roots, that or truly returned to his roots. That is not to say that the RV isn’t funny because it is and can be but it also at the same time a very clichéd and worn out movie that has been shown a dozen times and a dozen different ways. Maybe its been so long since Williams has done a comedy he forgot how to do one because I can think of a dozen forty something actors they could have replaced him with and the movie would have been exactly the same thing. There is no Robin Williams energy or pizzazz to this movie, the stuff that made him famous, the stuff that made him funny, the stuff that made his movies more than your run of the mill easily slapped together comedies where every element an actor is and was easily interchangeable with a dozen other actors or scenarios. I laughed on occasion, I cringed just as often though and while I enjoyed the movie it just made me miss Robin Williams the real Robin Williams just that much more.

Have you ever questioned whether a director or a screenwriter has kids or knows anything about kids and yet the irony is they are doing a movie that is about kids and somewhat geared towards kids, these questions came to mind when I saw RV. I have my doubts that Barry Sonnenfeld or the writers have kids that or the fact they like to paint their pictures with rose colored lenses because I am sorry teenagers and kids do not act or react like the movies kids did in the slightest bit. A single road trip does not turn the sully, and hostile teenager into an angel once more committed to their family and love once more. I may lead a sheltered life too because I rarely see kids play the hip hop poser or wigger that the main male kid plays as well. The movie makes fun of some of the extremes of adolescence but nowhere does it come close to actually portraying realistic kids or scenarios and it makes the movie a poser as well. I am sorry National Lampoon’s Vacation did it best and movies like RV are just trying to cash in on a quick dollar for a few cheap laughs.

The casting doesn’t seem too bad until you actually watch the movie. Instead of getting the manic Robin Williams you get stuck with a watered down cheap forty something version of the funny man. You get a couple of kids who can’t act in Joanna 'JoJo' Levesque whom I am informed is a wannabe pop star and Josh Hutcherson coupled with a mom who doesn’t do much better in the acting department in Cheryl Hines and then they have try to make do with a bad script. The part of Uncle Eddy is played by Jeff Daniels who gives it his own spin in a crazy partridge family kind of way but he ain’t no Uncle Eddy. The script is weak, the acting is poor, the laughs are there but they are cheap laughs, and in the end you leave with a somewhat satisfied feeling wishing the movie had tried just a little bit harder.

Grade: C