Vacaciones en familia

This movie should have been funnier. So many things made no sense like why Cedric insisted on talking with that ridiculous accent and why Steve Harvey refused to be funny. As a black man, I am so disappointed when a black movie just sucks.

It was a good kid movie, though, because kids don't care.

The Griswald family's first vacation is the standard for all vacation movies. However, it is not as kid friendly as Johnson Family Vacation. The hot tub scene with the 4 big girls was just begging for funny. Hitler could have gotten more laughs in that scene. Vanessa Williams could not possibly be any more beautiful, though. It was almost worth the price of admission to see her, but not quite.

It is an annual event in the wider Johnson clan to get together for a reunion of food, song and competition – a competition that is always won by Mack Johnson. Despite being separated from his wife, Nate Johnson gets his family together to attend as usual and keep up appearances. With a brand new Navigator truck and a tight time scale, the family of five set out on their road trip only to find themselves having to deal with cement, police, alligators and hitchhikers – and that's all before they get to the reunion.

I generally avoid all-black comedies; not because I am racist but because the opposite is true – and I find that many of these modern blaxploitation comedies are full of racist stereotypes and broad ethnic caricatures. With this film screening on a flight I was on I decided to watch it as I find it very difficult to sleep on planes. I was pleased to find that the film didn't base itself on racist stereotypes and the like and instead went for the more race-neutral approach of road movie broad gags a la Vacation. This is not to say that it is funnier – only easier to watch because it is less offensive to me personally. The plot is very simple but it makes the mistake of not staying simple – instead it adds subplots of separation and treats them seriously. This is a problem because it rounds them off in glib, unconvincing ways that make a joke out of ever having them in the first place – the whole issue of Nate and Dorothy working things out is a perfect example, the supposed focal point of the family contest is another one – it feels tacked on.

The film is not anywhere near as funny as it needed to be to be a good comedy. It has the odd laugh but generally the humour is so very broad and uninspired that it is hard to do anything but raise the occasional smile. Part of the reason it is even slightly funny is due to the good work from Cedric the Entertainer. He isn't great here but he does manage to get laughs from the poor material he is given to deliver. Bow Wow is hardly much of a draw but aside from being an annoying rapper cliché in the making, he does do well alongside Cedric. Williams is an OK actress but here she has nothing to do – she has no laughs and she is betrayed by the script when it comes to the serious side of the film. Knowles looks sexy but that's it – nothing more than that; likewise Soleil is a 'cute kid' and nothing more. Harvey is so poor that I actually wondered if he was the reason that the whole 'family contest' thing was pushed into such a small part of the film.

Overall this is a very average film at best. The plot is terrible at points and just annoyed me in the way that it seemed to just write-off the entire affair in the final section. The laughs come mainly from Cedric who does OK considering the very broad material he has to work with (and with little support from his co-stars). It's good that it more or less avoid the lazy racist stereotyping inherent in the 'black comedy' genre but it would have been nice if they'd replaced it with something worthwhile.

When I saw the rating of 3.4 for JFV I was really surprised. I thought that it would at least have a rating of 6.7 or 7.0. I really hate to say it that people like crap movies like van helsing and alamo but think that this movie is bad. JFV was simply hilarious and it is a very neat and clean comedy with neat and clean humor mostly. Everyone must watch this movie with an open mind. This is for the first time black people have been treated so well on screen and I really loved it because the kind of role they are normally seen in are crackheads or drug dealers. In this movie the black family is shown as a very normal and civilized family and I really liked it. Good Job Cedric the entertainer.

My Rating 10/10

Spend a couple of hours with the Griswold, oops, I mean Johnson family as they take to the road for their family reunion.

Cedric the Entertainer supplies the laughs, all seven of them. A sexy female traveler inciting marital tension, being given the wrong car at the dealership, unkempt rural relatives, we've seen it all before.

But what might be the funniest thing of all about this predictable remake of National Lampoon's Vacation is that (Lil') Bow Wow has a higher billing than Vanessa Williams.

But the fact remains that if you are looking for about 90 minutes of profanity free family entertainment which, by the way, is becoming harder and harder to find these days, then maybe The Johnson Family Vacation is just what the doctor ordered.

I had printed out the earlier review, as I found it was going to be one of the in-flight movies due to be shown on a flight from Cleveland to London last week, so was forewarned that it was not one of the best films ever made. However, I had not realized that it was going to prove to be undoubtedly the most awful film I have ever seen. A truly stomach churning experience; everyone seemed to over act outrageously and all spoke at full volume the whole time. I even tried it with other language sound tracks on the aircraft sound system but nothing could improve it. I believe it was supposed to be a comedy but how anyone could find anything remotely amusing in this sorry farrago, beats me. Definitely NOT recommended!