Old Dogs

A businessman (Robin Williams) is saddled with 7-year-old twins, the children he didn’t know he had, while his ex-wife (Kelly Preston) serves a two-week jail sentence; to help entertain them, he turns desperately to his business partner (John Travolta). Sadly, no one—least of all director Walt Becker or writers David Diamond and David Weissmann—seems to have given much thought to entertaining us. Williams and Travolta’s well-known comic chops are no match for the script’s uneasy mix of vulgarity and sentimentality (the kind that sometimes passes for family comedy), and Becker deploys the same oafish hand he brought to Wild Hogs and Van Wilder. The movie seems (understandably) to have sat on the shelf while The Walt Disney Company wondered what to do with it: co-star Bernie Mac passed away over a year ago.