RV

The rented recreational vehicle condescended to in the stalled family roadtrip comedy RV isn’t just unwieldy and RV-ish: It’s also custom crapped-up, painted in streaks of garish green with a splotch of orange highlighting the gigantic photographic likeness of ”Irv,” whose rental business it is. In fact, the face of Irv is supplied by the movie’s director, Barry Sonnenfeld. And the look of outsized huckster idiocy the man who made Men In Black sports as a stressed-out, high-income L.A. family of four motors east to Colorado sums up everything unnecessarily braying about this group-healing-through-fecal-sightgags adventure.

Somewhere in the project (with a script by The Shaggy Dog‘s Geoff Rodkey and a cast that includes Robin Williams, Jeff Daniels, and the 24/7 caffeinated Kristin Chenoweth) is a mildly goofball, essentially conservative midlife appreciation of health, togetherness, and good American fortune. But an addiction to antics and gags, many of them involving Daniels and Chenoweth as full-time RVers, makes it difficult for a viewer to smell the roses between jokes involving mad raccoons and strange-looking fellow Americans from the part of America that’s not L.A. And as Williams ricochets between playing submissive soft-drink executive tethered to the whims of a hysterical boss (Arrested Development‘s Will Arnett, who better?) and pathetic dad at the wheel, trying to cajole his family into vacation satisfaction, we can be excused for getting carsick.