Short takes
ARE WE DONE YET? One year (in movie time) on from the action of 2005’s Are We There Yet?, sports memorabilia salesman Nick Persons (Ice Cube) has sold his business, launched a magazine and moved his newlywed bride (Nia Long) and two pouty, foul-tempered stepkids into his cramped Portland apartment. The unexpected arrival of a bun in the oven prompts a move to the bucolic countryside and a too-good-to-be-true fixer-upper—which quickly proves to be just that. Fans of the first film can rest assured that a change in the director’s chair—Dr. Doolittle 2 auteur Steve Carr taking over for the presumably indisposed Brian Levant—has done little to curb the overall tone of slapstick desperation, as the game-faced Mr. Cube does battle with the forces of nature, power tools and a raft of risible ethnic caricatures. Reportedly, this is a remake of the popular 1948 Cary Grant comedy Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, though I’ll be damned if I can remember the scene where Grant chased a CGI raccoon across his roof and crashed through to the porch below only to look up and see the little bugger waving back at him tittering, “Ha ha, sucker!” —Scott Foundas (Opens Wednesday everywhere)
THE REAPING Those two age-old foes—science and blind faith—tango yet again in this noxious slice of Biblical horror about a series of Old Testament plagues visited upon a Louisiana bayou backwater. Hilary Swank stars as the resident non-believer, an ordained minister turned university professor recruited by a rural schoolteacher (David Morrissey) to convince the locals that there’s a perfectly rational explanation (global warming?) for why their once-crystalline lake has turned into a crimson tide pool. In short order, frogs rain from the heavens, bad CGI cattle drop dead in their tracks, and hideous boils break out on human skin, until Swank starts to wonder if maybe she was wrong to turn her back on the Lord after her husband and daughter were killed on a missionary trip to the Sudan. (Cue overexposed flashbacks of ooga-booga tribesmen.) Two years ago, Paul Schrader’s uneven but compelling Exorcist prequel used the trappings of a genre film to explore complex questions of belief (or lack thereof) in a seemingly godless world. For Reaping director Stephen Hopkins (Predator 2), the plight of post-Katrina Louisiana and war-torn Africa is just another special effect in a bag of shopworn tricks. The only real curse is on anyone unlucky enough to buy a ticket. —Scott Foundas (Opens Thursday everywhere)
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