Parental Guidance (2012)

This week, for the bad movie, I picked a movie that I didn’t find all that bad.  Sure, the comedic aspects of the movie did not completely land, and the story is something that is not all that interesting on the surface.  I can give anyone who watches it that much.  It’s not a great movie.  That would be giving it too much credit.  However, Parental Guidance is not the disaster that I have been led to believe.

Parental Guidance was released in late 2012.  It starred Billy Crystal, Bette Midler, Marisa Tomei, a bunch of kids, and Tom Everett Scott.  The plot is about some grandparents coming to take care of their grandkids, while both getting a second chance to parent and teaching their child how to parent.  There are some misunderstandings, some bad moments, some good moments, some embarrassments, and some heart.

When I watched Parental Guidance, I did it over two days.  I started it late one night, and decided that I needed sleep more than I needed to finish the movie.  When I woke up, I finished the movie.  This is something I’ve done before, and something that never really had the same results that it had this time.  That break that I inserted there was placed almost perfectly, at about the halfway point of the movie.  It separated what I thought wasn’t good from what I thought was good.  It isn’t because of the sleep.  My mood had nothing to do with it.  It was the fact that at about halfway through, the movie goes from a tiring experience to something actually entertaining.

The first half of the movie is a bunch of jokes that do not stick.  The jokes feel like they were directed towards a child demographic, yet the movie itself skews older.  This sort of rift in the tone of the humour only goes toward hurting the movie in the long run.  It pulls the movie apart at the seams.  It is hard for me to invest myself into a movie that does not know what it is.  I like movies with a clear sense of what they are doing, and the first half of Parental Guidance did not have that...well, um...guidance.  A quick rewrite or removal of some material in this half of the movie could have tightened it up and gave a better clarity to the movie.

When I woke from my nightly bed rest, I continued the movie into the second half and noticed a difference.  Once the relationships are in place, the comedy within the movie becomes more focused.  It goes from being two conflicting tones to one consistent, relationship-based style of comedy.  The movie flows better, and the jokes are more amusing.  There’s an improvement to Parental Guidance, and it only gets better.

The emotional payoff at the end of Parental Guidance is astonishingly good.  After finding the first half of the movie to be a slog with bad jokes, characters I didn’t care about, and conflicted writing, the ending was surprisingly touching.  The focus on the relationship that the second half had came to a climax that paid off all of the storylines rather well.  I would not have expected this before I went to sleep but was delighted to find it after I awoke.  I felt something while watching this movie and it wasn’t pure hatred.

Parental Guidance is not as bad of a movie as I thought going into it.  I contemplated not even writing about it.  I thought it was better than what I would include in the Sunday “Bad” Movie blog posts.  When I looked at IMDb and saw that it was 5.8/10, I continued my contemplation.  Then I looked at Rotten Tomatoes where it was 18%, and I remembered the collective internet “Ugh” upon seeing trailers and commercials for it.  I felt like saying that it is better than you would assume.  It is by no means great, but it isn’t a terrible film either.  It’s an alright watch, and I would easily watch it again.

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There are a few notes that I would like to make in this post:

• Joshua Rush, who played one of the children in Parental Guidance, was also in an uncredited role in Playing For Keeps.
• If you have any suggestions, feel free to leave a comment, or message me on Twitter.  All suggestions are considered.