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The trailer to Daddy Day Care, a typical fish-out-of-dignity comedy from a once-talented comedian who should know better, opens on the beautiful corner office of a high-salaried employee. We're told that the occupant of this office, Charlie Hinton (Eddie Murphy), is a man who "had it all…until the moment it was all stripped away." At this point, one might reasonably expect a record-scratch noise, followed by James Brown's signature yowl in a Motown hit -- thus reassuring the audience of the sorts of wacky lunacy we can expect. Oddly, the trailer doesn't resort to this. You might consequently be lulled into a false sense of expectation. "No record scratch? A total absence of Motown? Say, maybe this won't be as ridiculously asinine as the title suggests." Having watched the trailer several times over, I can guarantee you right now: the only reason we've been spared these cliches is due to the apathy and perhaps even profound incompetence of the filmmakers. If they'd cared enough, or could find their asses with both hands enough, they certainly would have included the record-scratch and James Brown -- in a heartbeat, without hesitation. Make no mistake: the jokes in the trailer for Daddy Day Care are of "record-scratch/Motown hit" caliber. Possibly even Blink 182 / reverberatingly-loud-fart-noise caliber. We watch as Hinton is fired from his job, along with obese comic foil Jeff Garland. Isn't that convenient, fired with your best friend? I wish when I'd been fired from my last job, I could have taken an overweight comic foil with me to my next gig.
KLAXON SOUNDS.
Newly unemployed, Hinton soon finds himself trapped in his now unaffordable home, staring endlessly (and somewhat off-puttingly) at his adorably precocious son. (We don't see what Garland is up to, but I imagine much the same -- with maybe the adorable son replaced by a jumbo-sized bag of pork rinds.) Hinton and his son stare at each other for an uncomfortably long stretch of time. Not for any comedic reaction that I could see. They just stare at each other. Did someone forget to turn the camera off? Are they waiting for the script? Is the director asleep? Luckily, the announcer steps in to get the trailer moving again, informing us that "sometimes, the answer to all of life's problems is staring you right in the face." The voice offering up this platitude neglects to offer an important caveat to this philosophy. Namely, what it means if what's staring you right in the face is Eddie Murphy's face. Unless you're a lawyer, Murphy's been caught with a transvestite prostitute, and you're about to make a bundle, I strongly doubt the answer to any of life's problems is staring you in the face. Rather, one of life's problems is. Hinton decides to open a day care center, and the rest of the trailer is a concentration of purest wackiness, unrivaled since Chevy Chase fell down 7,000 steps in his 1984 comedy Fallin' Down the Steps! For instance, we see Murphy accidentally slam his four-year-old son into a doorframe, in a dependable piece of vaudeville -- here, of course, substituting a small child's skull for a vaudevillian's. Remember the old "Slipping on a coconut peel" bit, or the "Getting hit in the face with the band Cream?" bit? Much like these, the "Grabbing your son's arm and jogging him into a doorframe" bit is a comedic convention that audiences never seem to tire of. The convicted child abusers in the audience seemed to like it, anyway.
The only bright spot to this film's existence is that it's coming out in May. By then, one hopes, the heat will help work up various terrorists' ire enough to dump a few SUV's worth of manure and nitroglycerin into the thinly-gated walls of each of the major studios. (Hear that, terrorists? Thinly-gated.) In conclusion, this trailer appeals to no known group, sect, or mentality. It neither sells its purported wares nor even provides an appealing alternative to rainy day blues or unwanted holiday gatherings. It is the bloody snot scooped out of the drowned lungs of a cystic fibrosis victim during the post mortem. It is the crushing power of Jupiter's gravity. It is a blowjob from a hungry tiger shark. It is the -- well, it's bad, is my point. In fact, this trailer is so poorly constructed, I am forced to use scientific notation to describe my disgust. I give the trailer to Daddy Day Care a staggering 1 X 10-26 Billy Crystals, seen here under the magnification of Los Alamos National Laboratory's Billy Crystal Electron Microscope. At least science is doing its job. Heck, maybe they can give me my sight back. Nutty Professor 22 should be out by then. RATING:
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There
must be a little spider blood in Eddie Murphy's family tree. Watching
his comedies gives me a chill only the presence of those eight-legged
monstrosities can induce. And, since spiders eat their young, I make
one simple request of Eddie's mother: Please eat your son. Stop
defying nature and do your job. The sun shines down, trees grow tall,
spiders eat their young. You don't even have to do it all at once, Mrs.
Murphy. But I ask that you start now.
The
highlight of the trailer, however, is a poop gag. It's been a classy
ride this far; why bother to change gears now? Eddie lets a small child
into the bathroom to take care of business and work some overtime. The
kid comes out seconds later, announcing that he "missed."
Eddie peeks his head around the bathroom door to inspect the situation.
Gauging from the fifteen-second reaction shot of him looking around in utter
horror, we are to assume that the child has crapped his own body weight
in fecal matter onto the ceiling. Doesn't make an ounce of sense, of
course. Still: poop! [rimshot] Huh? Huh? Say no more.