Der Kindergarten Daddy 2 - Das Feriencamp

I guess the only reason you should watch this family movie with your family is if you hate both your family and yourself.

OK first off i was put off this movie by the fact that Eddie Murphy didn't want to be in it, which looking at the films he pumps out now is saying something (i have Norbit in mind) i only saw this movie as a friend had it so it didn't cost me anything, and i was sorely disappointed.

I had always liked Cuba Gooding Jr. since i saw him in rat race, but this has ruined my opinion of him.

I found this movie unfunny and as it develops it becomes a poor mans cheaper by the dozen 2 (which was no masterpiece itself) truly a film to avoid

Wow. I can only assume that either Cuba Gooding Jr.'s agent is crazy. How else can an actor go from an Oscar-winning performance in "Jerry McGuire" to making crap like "Daddy Day Camp" in a decade? As the expression goes...."my how the mighty have fallen"! Here, you know you are in for trouble when this film is meant as a DVD sequel, of sorts, to an Eddie Murphy comedy--a man whose taste in film projects in recent years has also been baffling to say the least! Both men play the same character, Charlie Hinton, and I guess we are to assume he's been through a major accident and massive plastic surgery between films--only this would explain how much Charlie has changed!

So why would I choose to watch a film that from all appearances will be crap? After all, in addition to the down and out Gooding, the film also has the distinction of being on IMDb's Bottom 100 list--the 100 lowest rated films with at least 1500 ratings. Well, by this point, I've done over 8000 reviews and I've gotten bored. After watching a lot of foreign, art and independent films, I have recently decided to try watching the very worst there is to offer as a change of pace! I've already seen 41 of the 50 worst films from the Harry Medved book ("The Fifty Worst Films of All Time") and since the other 9 just don't seem to be available, I'm now working on IMDb's list. This particular film is about the 55th film from this list I have seen. Wow, am I a glutton for punishment!! But also, I like laughing at the ineptness of many of these films--they often really are unintentionally funny. Of course, occasionally they are just horrible...period.

The film begins with a Black actor and a White actor (just like in "Daddy Day Care"--just with different actors). They are trying to find the perfect summer day camp experience for their kids. They hit upon the lame idea of re-opening the camp that they'd gone to as kids--as it's bankrupt and COULD be run successfully if they use their "Daddy Day Care" method they used in the last film.

As for the camp, the kids and their parents are all kooky characters (or is it 'caricatures'?. Of course, things soon completely fall apart at first and things look dire for the future of the camp--especially when the folks at Camp Canola (who bear a lot of similarity to the folks at Cobra Kai) try to put them out of business and buy their land. But, given that this is a Hollywood film, you can safely assume that against all odds, everything will magically work out by the end of the movie. So what is their secret for making it all work? Charlie brings in his drill sergeant-like father, the Colonel, to help run things--since he is an organized man of action. And, of course, there is the obligatory sports competition between the nice camp and the evil one.

Overall, the film isn't quite as bad as you might think, though it's all formulaic and predictable and has every cliché this sort of film could possibly have. Now I am not saying it's good--but it's also pretty harmless entertainment for kids. However, I can't imagine teens or parents watching this poorly written fluff and actually enjoying it because the writing is amazingly broad and the humor awfully dim.

A sequel, with a new cast and new theme. The movie was a utter disappointment, for the reasons of the bad characters, bad dialog and recklessly unfunny sequences. The opening movie Daddy Day Care was a found enjoyment, and a nice family movie. Cuba Gooding Jr. always one of my favourite actors, almost made me hate him for his performance. Basically he just acted himself, and laughed or screamed here and there. A boring, fun-made family movie that just targets towards kids for their innovative crude and immature humor. The characters were either too over the top and executed wrongly, or there was hardly no character in one at all. Daddy Day Camp is an humorless piece of garbage, that shouldn't be seen by anyone, at any time.

After sitting through the entirety of Daddy Day Camp, I have to wonder what was going through everyone's minds who were involved in the making. The most likely reason was probably them thinking, "Is it really possible to make a movie this year that is worse than Evan Almighty and Delta Farce? Let's go for it!" Fortunately, Daddy Day Camp is nowhere near as horrible as those other two films, but lord know that it does come very close. This abomination of a movie somehow manages to feature a great actor, Cuba Gooding, Jr., in by far his worst role yet.

Anyone even slightly familiar with the first film will know the deal here. Low on money, Charlie Hinton decides to open up a camp similar to the day care service he ran in the first movie. Along the way, he must resolve problems with his father and show his son that he really loves him.

Yes, I know the plot sucks. While the first movie wasn't anything to write home about, Daddy Day Camp is about a thousand times worse. In the few scenes where there is supposed to be something meaningful occurring, everything just comes off in the wrong way. It might be because everything about this careless sequel is just ridiculous. Was it really necessary to make a sequel? The first film is almost entirely disregarded and almost every role is recast (although I haven't seen the first one in quite some time so there might not be any of the original cast members returning.) When Eddie Murphy turned down the movie, they should have just dropped it and forgotten about it. He was part of what made the first movie work, to some sort of level. His manic energy, his great comedic timing, his general appeal… Cuba Gooding Jr. is a great actor, but this role was just altogether wrong for him. It just didn't work as well as it should have. That being said, however, he was certainly the best aspect about this utterly atrocious film.

Daddy Day Camp is missing much of the magic that made the first movie watchable. None of the scene meld together very well (some of the younger characters go from heartfelt moments, to being rude to other kids for no reason to be rude and increasingly annoying) and the writing and dialogue are as unbelievable as they come. The villain is just pathetic, and the lesson that is supposed to be learned by the end of the film is a very weak one. Since none of the younger characters follow this lesson throughout the movie or seem to have learned anything by the film's end, it all feels just so useless. There are also, of course, those same old gross-out gags that you find in any boring family comedy. Here, however, they are not done as tastefully as in Underdog or as effectively as in the Cheaper By the Dozen films. In Daddy Day Camp, just like with the first film, it is pretty much lame gag after lame gag, watching flashy boring moments thrown onto the screen in the hopes that something will stick and not come off as completely and totally immature. In the first film, more often than not, most of the gags worked to a certain extent. In this film, there are very few redeeming factors, though. Barely any of those gags work. In fact, I didn't even crack a smile throughout the whole movie, and I am incredibly easy to please.

Another huge problem of the film was that most of the child actors were not only annoying, but their acting was so bad that I wanted to kill myself. Each person had their moments, but the kids mostly came off as incredibly inexperienced. Movies as bad as Daddy Day Camp could at least have the common decency to provide us with a semi-likable cast of children that won't annoy us to death throughout the movie. The people who cast this predictable shame of a movie should have learned a lesson from the talents of the kids in the feature film adaption of How to Eat Fried Worms. All of those kids were incredibly likable, and I loved every minute spent with them and their childhood lives. That film is much more interesting and complex than this simplistic bore-fest that cannot even credit a single laugh to its name. With Evan Almighty, I did at least laugh quite a few times. In Daddy Day Camp, I cannot even give it that compliment. The only reason that it ended up better than Evan Almighty was because of the story between Charlie and his father. Surprisingly enough, it actually worked at times, and it worked very well I must say. And not all of the kids were completely terrible.

So all in all, Daddy Day Camp was a pretty crappy movie filled with wasted talent and some of the worst child actors I've seen on screen. It is really obvious from the get-go that very little effort was put into this boring sequel. I just hope that nobody goes into this movie expecting even a relatively good movie, because it disappoints with even the lowest of expectations. 2.5/10