Cheaper by the Dozen series

  • Cheaper by the Dozen (1950)

    Cheaper by the Dozen (1950)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, February 2021) Considering that the Steve Martin remake version is far more familiar nowadays than the original, I went into the first Cheaper by the Dozen expecting a much sillier and funnier film than it is. Compared to the remake, the original takes on a substantially more serious tone, being framed around a grown woman’s memories of her father, an efficiency expert whose eccentricity dominated a household with a dozen children. There’s an added nostalgic quality to the film, as it takes place in the 1920s as filtered by the late 1940s, adapted from real people (four of them have their own Wikipedia pages!)  Much of the film’s humour comes from the atypical reactions of the efficiency-minded expert — but it’s fairly gentle humour. Director Walter Lang doesn’t go for big slapstick, and the film hums along pleasantly until the unexpectedly elegiac ending. The affectionate tone of a daughter reminiscing about her father makes the film different enough from its silly remake to be interesting, and the historical nature of the film’s episodes is also distinctive. It’s well worth a look even if you’re not a big fan of the remake.

  • Cheaper by the Dozen 2 (2005)

    Cheaper by the Dozen 2 (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2019) I’m not sure there’s anything meaningful to say about Cheaper by the Dozen 2. It’s very much what it wants to be: a sequel to the 2003 Steve Martin version of Cheaper by the Dozen, a lowest-common-denominator family comedy working in the broadest possible comic register. While the result will be a hit for kids, anyone over the age of eight is likely to be bored by the obvious jokes you can see coming from miles away, the obvious plot threads and the complete lack of surprise. It is what it wants to be—an innocuous family comedy with a nostalgic bent, far too many characters to properly develop beyond a few gags, with a familiar soundtrack telling us what to feel if we’re not too sure. Martin himself seems to be daring himself to mug it up as widely as possible, perhaps in a kind of performance art piece echoing the kind of Dadaistic stand-up he did earlier in his career. It is fun to see Eugene Levy also hamming it up as an antagonist, and a few familiar names in smaller roles. Cheaper by the Dozen 2 is not much, but then again—if you start watching a sequel, you know what to expect, for better or for worse.