College Road Trip, 2008

College Road Trip, 2008
Director: Roger Kumble
Cast: Raven-Symone, Martin Lawrence, Kym Whitley



Stage: Home theatre, TV selection


College road trip in short: When an overachieving high school student decides to travel around the country to choose the perfect college, her overprotective cop father also decides to accompany her in order to keep her on the straight and narrow.


Preps: Hm, an evening at home, am half sick and looking for entertainment. I need to see what's on menu for tonight. Martin Lawrence might be a good selection.


Reality: Ehm.. I am terribly wrong. Martin Lawrence, least in this piece, is NOT a good selection for any night. This comedy is really underestimating the observers, the sense of humour might amuse an eight-year-old child. I mean, the scenes are badly played, the scenario/texts are awful, there is absolutely no way I buy the pig and the relationship between Lawrence and the magic pig.
Maybe in some sick reality I would once have written that it's a decent comedy. However, I cannot claim that. I hope that when I have kids they will also not like this sort of movies, not the ones, that are played so terribly. What it is with average directed american movies that they think the audience can buy anything? That anything is good enough for us..
Enough spitting, you get it, I don't like it. However, the movie touches an important part of one's life, getting your kid into college. For US citizen and many other countries, this is firstly, very expensive, secondly, you need to let your teenage child far far away (in most cases) and thirdly, it practically shows, what kind of a parent were you and if you feel threatened or frightened to leave the kid out alone, then you haven't been doing much of a job. In US college in most cases of average families means life time savings or if you got lucky and some auntie reminded you in her will. Otherwise, the prime colleges are usually very distant from an average family with average income. In this sense, Slovenia can still be called heaven, because education in college is free of charge and a lot of people are abusing the status. Nevertheless, the prime goal of this movie is supposed to be a devastated father, not willing to let go of his little girl, finding out she's an adult afterall and making bonds with the father (sadly, at the end of journey you get to spend with your folks anyway). Well, better late then never.
However, everything you see in this piece is a pure example of how not to show anything like this. You never feel the real interaction between the actors, exaggeration was the key to this movie's delivery. Lawrence isn't Jim Carey and he shouldn't try to play a clown like that. Jim at least has his perticular audience. In Lawrence's deal, he would need to decide what to be and not try to resemble top comics from this genre.


My personal rating: 1,0 (waste of time. Totally. Not even close to what I want to see in this kind of storyflow or genre).


College Road on IMDB