College Road Trip

An obsessively overprotective dad (Martin Lawrence) offers to drive his high-school-senior daughter (Raven-Symoné) to her applicant interview at Georgetown University, 700 miles away—all the while plotting to see that she attends Northwestern, much closer to home. Somehow it took four writers to crank out what passes for a script: novices Emi Mochizuki and Carrie Evans and the more experienced (if no more gifted) Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul; it’s essentially Are We There Yet? with a twist of daddy-I’m-a-big-girl-now conflict. Meanwhile, Roger Kumble’s idea of direction is simply to shove the camera right up into his actors’ screaming, grimacing faces. Perhaps he was thinking ahead to the iPod video release, when the screen will be only one-and-a-half inches square. We should all have waited that long.