Yours, Mine and Ours

Two widowed former sweethearts, he (Dennis Quaid) now an admiral in the Coast Guard and she (Rene Russo) now a hippie-dippy handbag designer, get married on an impulse, throwing their kids (his eight and her 10) into a huge, instant, battling family. How to explain a mess like this? Evidently, director Raja Gosnell and writers Ron Burch and David Kidd took one look at the execrable Steve Martin-Bonnie Hunt version of Cheaper by the Dozen and said, “Hey, we can do worse than that!” Well, incredible as it may sound, they succeeded. This sloppy, gooey, indigestible holiday pudding is guaranteed to make you long for the gritty realism and hard-hitting domestic drama of The Brady Bunch and Eight Is Enough. Any similarity to the 1968 original with Henry Fonda and Lucille Ball is merely a horrible coincidence.