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ALEXANDER AND THE TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD DAY – The Review – We Are Movie Geeks

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ALEXANDER AND THE TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD DAY – The Review

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Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

I love family films. I love movies that are directed towards children. ALEXANDER AND THE TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD DAY made me want to leave the theater within the first twenty minutes.

ALEXANDER AND THE TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD DAY follows the journey of Alexander (Ed Oxenbould) and his day, which hasn’t gone according to plan. Feeling like his family doesn’t understand his daily struggles, Alexander makes a birthday wish for his family to go through their own terrible, horrible bad day… which happens to be on his birthday. Now, his family struggles to make it through their series of bad luck as Alexander looks on in worry and self blame. Will today ever go right?

Like I said previously… I love family movies. I support the idea of a movie that is built with almost every audience in mind so that both children and adults have a great cinematic experience. Having said that, I am a thirty-something single living in Los Angeles with no children. This film was not made for me. I feel like they tried to include my demographic, but missed the mark. The jokes were bad, the beats of this film were more than predictable, and it felt entirely too ordinary and boring. When I said that I wanted to leave within the first twenty minutes, I mean it. I tried to give the film a fair chance, and even sat through the whole thing. It didn’t get better. It didn’t get funnier. It didn’t feel more relatable. It got worse. The story is less than genuine, and the humor is forced. Allow me to elaborate…

Let’s start with casting. The young actors were great. Ed Oxenbould is a fantastic Alexander, and his older siblings Dylan Minnette and Kerris Dorsey really round out an amazing, realistic family dynamic. They didn’t go for the perfect, pretty Hollywood family, which I really enjoyed. Having said that, they didn’t develop the character of Alexander nearly enough. I’ll go into this more in a minute. As for Jennifer Garner – her character of Kelly was boring. She’s in good, under-appreciated company though, because they didn’t utilize the talents of Steve Carell at all! They had two Hollywood heavyweights on-screen together and did nothing with them. We have seen Jennifer Garner’s Kelly role before. At best, it’s a weird combination of her mother-like character in THE ODD LIFE OF TIMOTHY GREEN and her business savvy, robotic character from DRAFT DAY. Nothing new was brought to the table. In fact, I didn’t even believe her as the mother of these kids in the film. Her role, most likely from the screenplay, lacked heart. The film did nothing to help the audience care about her character. Why was she even there? The same goes for Steve Carell. They gave a great comedic / dramatic actor a role that was the “potty humor” level to his acting genius. He had no freedom to showcase his talents, so his character was left stale and forgettable.

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

This seems like a good time to talk about the screenplay. Let’s start with the Kelly character. SPOILER ALERT : Kelly, Garner’s character is fighting for a promotion at her job – a job which she doesn’t seem to really care about, and takes up an overwhelming amount of her time. At the end of the film, she gets the promotion that the film paints as evil. (Her boss looks at a photo of her child on a screen, after Kelly tells her that she needs to carve out time for her family, and says something along the lines of “You’re spending time with your child now.”) I’m all for women in the workplace. Heck, I’m an advocate of equal rights across the board. That isn’t the issue. Why is this film painting Kelly’s job like it’s a terrible thing, and then wrapping everything up with her getting the promotion that will take even more time away from her children? Nothing was ever shown in a positive light about her job. If they are trying to show audiences a realistic family portrait, they failed.  This is not the film to do it in. Everything else is wild, crazy and unbelievable. Now, to the more obvious observation… Why wasn’t more time spent on Alexander so that we, the audience, could build up an empathy for him? Rather than speeding up the runtime of this film (81 minutes), take an extra twenty to make the audience really care what is going on to Alexander! Why does he feels the need to make a wish for his family to experience what he feels on a daily basis? I’m not sure. They hinted at the isolation, and lack of connection with his family, but didn’t take the time to explore it. Alexander is such a beloved character from the pages of a book. His fans deserve less of a formula-driven family movie and more of a compassionate story treatment.

Between the male strippers, “dump” jokes, and slapstick shenanigans, the beloved book version of ALEXANDER AND THE TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD DAY becomes lost. They made an attempt to make this film enjoyable to all viewing ages, but by trying too hard the film loses its focus, and becomes a boring, cluttered mess.

I wish I could give this film a good review. I feel like audiences deserve a fun, enjoyable family film. Unfortunately, this is not it.

OVERALL RATING : 2 out of 5 stars

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Nerdy, snarky horror lover with a campy undertone. Goonies never say die.