A widowed Coast Guard Admiral, Frank Beardsley (Dennis Quaid) meets his likewise widowed high school sweetheart, Helen North (Rene Russo), in a restaurant. Not ones to question serendipity, the pair hopes to pick up where they left off in high school. What they forget is that they have eighteen children between the two of them and that they each have their rising careers to worry about.
Negating all logic and concern for the welfare of their children, the pair elope, buy a dilapidated lighthouse and begin their life together. The film combines the large-family antics of "Cheaper by the Dozen" with the stepfamily humor of "Step by Step," although Russo's acting ability is a few steps below Suzanne Somers'. Characters, like the Midwestern, mullet-ridden cast of "Step by Step," are taken to ludicrous extremes to extenuate the incompatibility of Frank and Helen's children. Artist and cheerleader. Navy cadet and emo vocalist. The juxtaposition's appeal is lost in the exaggeration.
As the family is kept together only by the love that Helen and Frank share, their children target their parents' relationship as a means to end the apparently exasperating reality of being siblings.
The film is a hodge-podge of clich?d and predictable montages. Cleaning the house ends in a paint fight, taking out a sailboat leaves Frank with a concussion and a vomit-covered ship and the meticulous scheduling of bathroom times leaves his children out on the lawn, fooled into a fire drill by Helen's kids. In the end, there is only one way the stepsiblings can be brought together: destroying their parents' marriage!
Between Quaid's slapstick and Russo's poor portrayal of a free spirit Earth mother, the brunt of the acting falls to the children. Director Raja Gosnell's attempt to leave the family tensions up to exaggeration and juxtaposition fails to capture the magic of the original 1968 version. That one, starring Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda as the star-crossed lovers, doesn't have Frank "google-ing" Helen's name after meeting her again. While attempting to modernize a classic family film, Quaid tries to keep it together, but he ends up, like so many points during the film, face down in paint. Gosnell loses the sentimentality that made the original so worthwhile.
And in Gosnell's remake, anything worthwhile is tossed out the window. The film falls down under the weight of its own ridiculousness and shallow laughs. A family film should allow the viewers to empathize, to laugh because they can place themselves in the shoes of the characters. Gosnell offers us no such opportunity. All we receive is jokes our little brothers would enjoy and an almost visibly embarrassed Quaid. In exchange for reality, we get a giant lighthouse and eighteen screaming kids. We trade what could have been a rewarding examination of a larger-than-average family for childish pranks and potty humor. And in the end, even the reunion of the family by the blinking lighthouse lamp can't save this film from the toilet.
