‘COLLEGE Road Trip,” a comedy about a Chicago police chief who wants to keep his daughter from straying too far to college at Georgetown, is better than most Martin Lawrence movies – much as strep throat is better than malaria.
It’s a shame that the producers didn’t see the possibilities for tweaking this tepid script to turn it into a chilling tale of contemporary horror: Martin Lawrence running a police department? I’d rather have Jack Nicholson be caretaker of my hotel.
James (Lawrence) is a sentimental dad with a closet full of videos of his little girl at age 6. Now she’s a high school senior, fully brassy and completely sassy, and she’s played by
Raven-Symoné, star of the Disney Channel show “That’s So Raven,” an intergalactically renowned program that has nevertheless escaped my field of vision.
Raven-Symoné – has she really earned that many syllables? Let’s just call her RavSym, though that sounds like a video-game manufacturer – is a good girl called Melanie (sample dialogue: “I’m a good girl”) who nevertheless likes to sneak away from Dad to dance with her friends, though only at G-rated parties. The conflict at hand is not exactly boiling over.
Dad has been pushing her toward nearby Northwestern since she was a blastocyst, but Melanie gets an offer to interview at Georgetown, which in reality would mean an interview with a Chicago-based Georgetown grad.
She plans a road trip with her girlfriends. But her dad, getting dark inklings of her staying up till 10 o’clock and possibly sipping dangerous caffeinated beverages, pre-empts that by offering to drive her himself – mysteriously, in his police SUV. Again I resort to the commonplace: w/e.
By now even your not-very-bright tween is going to be bored, but things at least keep moving (my meaning is merely literal) and the movie doesn’t actively give offense, except to the intelligence.
As the father of another girl also looking at colleges, Donny Osmond turns up doing a nerdy sort of whiteface act, one that is increasingly common in movies with black protagonists: He wears pastel argyle, talks like a cheerleader and keeps singing show tunes uninvited (although how far this characterization diverges from Osmond’s actual personality is anyone’s guess).
Mel’s little brother turns out to be a stowaway hidden somewhere in the depths of the SUV with his excitable pet pig, who plays chess and can puzzle out a Rubik’s Cube in less than three oinks. The pig gets into some coffee and disrupts a wedding, though none of this alleged comedy has anything to do with the two lead characters.
I did laugh at one point, when Dad and daughter wind up on a bus filled with Chinese people wearing identical red T-shirts. It turns out to be a karaoke bus, and the song being delivered is “Sister Christian.”
Melanie, not previously revealed to be a singer or dancer (she’s a serious law school type), follows that up by busting out a song of her own, though for no apparent reason except to show off RavSym’s considerable skills at putting over a number. It’s nice to know she can do something; to this point in the movie she hasn’t shown a lot of wattage.
Everyone advances toward learning a nice little lesson, and Melanie offers up this nugget of truth: “I’m not a little girl anymore, Daddy, I’ve grown up.” There will be hugs.
COLLEGE ROAD TRIP
That’s So Disney Channel.
Running time: 83 minutes. Rated G (nothing objectionable). At the 84th Street, the Magic Johnson, the Orpheum, others.