Martin
Lawrence's long, sad devolution from the poor man's young Eddie Murphy to the
poor man's late-period Eddie Murphy continues with College Road Trip. Looking back at Lawrence's rocky
career, the descent from X-rated riffs on female hygiene to G-rated Disney
comedies with Donny Osmond seems dispiritingly inevitable. College Road Trip boasts the same
cynical combination of slapstick and sentimentality as such previous
family-friendly Lawrence joints as Big Momma's House and Rebound, only this time out the formula has
been reversed. Where the earlier films undercut rampant slapstick shenanigans
with drips of schmaltzy sentiment, Road Trip alternates vast expanses of sappy
sentiment—fans of heartfelt conversations about feelings set to gently
tinkling pianos will have a field day—with intermittent bursts of labored
physical comedy. In a bid to tap into the lucrative Dr. Doolittle market, the filmmakers have given
Lawrence a super-intelligent pig as a foil. Oh, how the hacky have fallen!
Maybe they'll give Cuba Gooding Jr. the lead in the sequel.
In his
tamest role to date, Lawrence stars as a ferociously overprotective
Chicago-area police chief terrified that his beloved daughter ('tween
phenomenon Raven-Symoné) will opt for Georgetown rather than matriculate at
nearby Northwestern. So he embarks on a college road trip with his
strong-willed, ambitious daughter that's equally stocked with physical comedy
set-pieces and earnest speeches about the importance of letting go and trusting
loved ones to make the right choices. It's a measure of how neutered Lawrence's
shtick has become that Osmond continuously upstages him as a psychotically
cheerful super-parent who's essentially a Successories poster brought to life.
The
almost perversely colorblind College Road Trip represents a strange milestone in
black film. Lawrence and company prove that a comedy about the very minor
problems of well-to-do African-Americans can be just as bland and toothless as
films about their Caucasian counterparts. Disney has finally made a movie that
might just be too wholesome even for the Disney Channel.