If I told you the latest comedy had a supporting cast that included Justin Long, Seth Green, Luis Guzman, Rita Wilson, Dax Shepherd, Bernie Mac, Matt Dillon and Ann-Margret, would you believe me when I said it sucked mightily?
I give you "Old Dogs," a comedy so by-the-numbers you'd have a harder time predicting what happens watching 90 minutes of Robin Williams doing dot-to-dot puzzles.
"Dogs" revolves around middle-agers Charlie (John Travolta) and Dan (Williams), lifelong chums who own a successful sports-marketing business who are about to branch out by scoring a massive contract with a Japanese firm.
Dan discovers that an old flame named Vicki (Kelly Preston, Travolta's real-life wife) bore him twin children seven years before during a drunken fling. But since this is a Disney film, the fling was actually a drunken quickie marriage that was annulled a few days later.
Turns out Dan held a flame for Vicki all those years, but she never bothered to tell him he had two kids running around, at least not until Vicki has to serve a couple of weeks in the klink (for trespassing of all things: she chained herself to a bulldozer to prevent construction of a neighborhood-disrupting somethingorother).
Insert random, disconnected shenanigans, insensitive dunderheaded male father figures, and ultimate easy mac-and-cheese lessons about life that most people learn when they're 10, right about...here.
"Old Dogs" is the kind of movie where the jokes are set up like dominoes, knocked down in the same scene, and rebuilt as the next sequence starts.
There's a spray-on tan joke where Dan ends up looking like an overcooked Thanksgiving turkey before meeting up with Vicki. We get our laugh moment, and the scene ends with Vicki fixing Dan's tan problem by saying "I know some old family secrets."
Next scene, no more tan.
We also get a scene involving prescription medications where Williams and Travolta take turns listing the potential side effects of their various drugs. The list includes dry mouth, increased appetite, loss of facial muscle control (?) and loss of depth perception.
Of course you know moments later the wacky kids will stumble into the bathroom, open the medicine chest for no reason, and inexplicably spill the pills from their designated spots. Instead of telling, they hastily replace them in all the wrong places, leading to our heroes taking them at the worst possible time (before an important golf outing with clients for one, a bereavement group meeting for another).
And I haven't even mentioned the concluding zoo scene, where our heroes break into the zoo to get to a birthday party and of course ending up in the animal exhibits. First Charlie and Dan leave junior member Ralph (Seth Green) to be mauled and killed by a gorilla (they must know it's going to turn mommy on him instead of killing him), then Dan leaves Charlie to be killed by ravenous penguins. All this after escaping the gorilla pen by climbing out of the gorilla exhibit (a gorilla can't escape this cage, but two middle-aged men can?).
I could go on all day about other bits, including a "human puppet" suit that teaches Dan to play with his children, a boy/girl/cub scout-type meeting, and Travolta's kid-unfriendly apartment, which literally contains poisoned spears.
It's good to know Dan is willing to sacrifice the lives of his friends to not disrupt a birthday party.
Robin Williams continues his descent into comedy hell, and drags a really nice supporting cast with him. The actors listed above deserve better, especially Bernie Mac. It makes me sad to think this is the last new thing we're going to see him in.
If you want to see comedy of this caliber, do yourself a favor: don't waste the money to see this movie. Instead just turn on any random Disney Channel comedy. You might not get the star power, but you'll certainly laugh more.