College Road Trip
If you know Raven-Symoné primarily as the cute kid added late in the runs of both The Cosby Show and Hanging with Mr. Cooper, then you’re probably too old for College Road Trip. If, however, you’ve grown up with her on the Disney Channel in That’s So Raven and Cheetah Girls, then you may very well want to check this one out.
This isn’t because the humor is aimed squarely at teenagers; it isn’t. The comedy actually plays pretty broadly. Most impressively, despite the presence of a pig in the cast there are no fart or poop jokes at all. The reason for the age split is that the world presented is straight out of a teenagers daydream of what the world is like and probably best seen before the reality of adulthood tempers things.
The story is very simple. The Porters are a stereotypical white bread suburban family (and I don’t use that word lightly; other than skin color, they are completely out of a 1950s family sitcom). Dad James (Martin Lawrence) is the police chief in an affluent Chicago suburb. His wife Michelle (Kym E. Whitley) is a successful real estate agent. Their youngest son, Trey (Eshaya Draper), is an 8-year-old super genius-slash-geek that has taught his pet pig to play chess. Finally, Raven-Symoné plays Melanie, a graduating high school senior who is looking to become a lawyer and is getting ready to go to college.
Unfortunately for her, she wants to go to Georgetown but Dad has been grooming her since birth to go to Northwestern University, which is only 40 miles away and would allow him to keep a close eye on her. Melanie secretly applies to Georgetown and is waitlisted so she just assumes she’ll be going to Northwestern after all, much to the delight of her dad.
Of course, at the last minute she gets an opportunity to interview for the opportunity for regular admission at Georgetown. The interview is in 3 days in Washington, D.C., giving dad three days to convince her to stick with Northwestern—and to make sure he’ll have that opportunity he decides they’ll drive to D.C.
Antics ensue, dad learns to trust his daughter, daughter learns dad just loves her and wants to protect her. If you’ve seen the trailer then you know all of this except how the pig ends up going along for the ride and what role Donny Osmond plays in things (the writers of this set themselves a challenging task: when starting with a family as bland as the Porters, how far do you have to go to create another family they can look down on for being dweebishly bland? Answer: Very, very far.)
The biggest problem with the movie that kids probably won’t care about but will leave parents wondering why they had to pay $10 to get in is that it all plays very much like a TV movie, which is weird since director Roger Kumble does have feature experience. First, coming in at just 83 minutes, including credits, it is really short and just about perfect for adding commercials and filling a 90-minute hole in the Disney Channel line-up. In fact, the action is so episodic that the beats for where they will add commercials are tangible.
The set-ups are also TV simple, frequently feeling like a 3-camera sitcom with the scene cutting from one medium shot to another as people have conversations. Effects (such as a misbehaving pig) are minimal and obviously executed. Halfway through the movie, the action also stops so that Raven-Symoné can perform a music video of Frankie Smith’s “Double Dutch Bus,” which I am sure is already, or soon will be, in heavy rotation on Radio Disney.
All of which isn’t to say I didn’t have fun with the movie. It has a certain mindless charisma and Raven-Symoné successfully reigns in the very broad acting method she uses in That’s So Raven without losing her charismatic screen presence. Martin Lawrence also manages to scale back the worst of his habits (though he doesn’t gain any screen presence).
There are also quite a few real laughs that came from unexpected places, though the main efforts are mostly flat (the pig just isn’t funny and the final farcical mad dash to the interview is both unfunny and completely nonsensical). If I were watching this on a Saturday afternoon I’d find it a perfectly amusing way of killing 90-minutes, but plunking down $10 plus popcorn seems way too much to invest in the experience.
If you do see it, keep an eye on young Eshaya Draper as the geeky younger brother. I sense the next Disney Channel star of a kid-comedy.
College Road Trip is a Walt Disney Pictures release
- Wide release on Friday, March 7
- Directed by Roger Kumble
- Screenplay by Emi Mochizuki, Carrie Evans, Cinco Paul, Ken Daurio
- Starring Raven-Symoné, Martin Lawrence, Eshaya Draper, Kym E. Whitley
- Rated G
- Alex’s Rating: 6 out of 10
