view_and_review The movie would have been good except: Little Bow Wow, Bow Bow, or Big Bow Wow, whatever you want to call him, was not funny. Nor was the girl who played his sibling, nor was Vannessa Williams, and nor was Steve Harvey. Cedric the Entertainer was the only beacon of light in this failed attempt at a family comedy. The situation just didn't make for a very good comedy, especially when this scenario has already been done so well by Chevy Chase and others. The road trip/family vacation gone wrong is a very played out story. This was not the right platform for an original or successful comedy, and it was not the right platform for Cedric the Entertainer to be as his name indicates: entertaining. It was somewhat humorous and it was bearable, it is more of a "nothing else is on" type movie.

mjw2305 The Johnson Family Vacation is just a re-hash of all the National Lampoon's Vacation movies, but i seem to remember them being funny; hmm? Perhaps they forgot to re-hash the the funny bits.The plot is obvious, all the gags and comedy situations have been seen before (more than once) and it drags on too long.On the plus side it is a very inoffensive family movie that may make you smile occasionally, and for that i give Cedric the entertainer great credit, to raise a smile with the weak material he has to deliver, is a work of genius.4/10 as it is, without Cedric it could have been pushing pretty hard for a one.

SDunne17 There are so many things wrong with this so-called 'comedy'. I would love to list everyone single one of the faults but as I am limited to 1,000 words, I won't be able to come close.To start with, the character's were undeveloped, unbelievable and dislikeable. In a road movie such as this one, where the only thing to carry the movie is the character's and their relationships, the audience needs to connect in some way with them to really be engaged with the story. The character's here are not engaging, they are mostly black stereotypes with no depth and do such unbelievable thing such as pee in plastic cup inside the car and throw each others CDs out of the car. The basic ideas for the family members were: separated parents, a wannabe rapper, a girl always on the phone and a sweet young girl. However, no one took these ideas and developed them into characters I could identify as real people.Another main problem of the movie is that it has set out to be a comedy but is, to put it simply, not funny. I didn't laugh once during this film, the jokes were just so dire. I just can't get my head around how having Nate climb a telephone pole in the middle of a corn field to get to the phone was supposed to be funny. Why was the phone at the top of a telephone pole in the middle of a corn field?The film is also lacking a point. I didn't understand why the five of them travelled through numerous states over several days just so they can compete for a meaningless trophy and so Bate can triumph over his obnoxious brother. As well as that, you don't Bate's family too win the trophy as you as spent the whole of the film building up a hate towards them.And finally, this film throws at us the biggest road movie cliché of the all, it shows us that the experience has made Bate a better person. He promises to be a better husband etc and you can see that the experience has had a profound effect on him but it was a bit too late in the film for it to try and get deep.Let me warn you now, do not watch this film. You will never get back the 97 minutes you spend on this.

shark-43 This movie is so lame, so cobbled together, so lazy that it is truly one of the worst comedies made in the past decade. Cedric might have to sell The Entertainer part of his name soon if he keeps making crap like this and The Honeymooners. I mean, give it up, you are not a LEAD. As part of an ensemble, you are terrific (as Cedric proved in Barbershop) but the first thing they do is take a live wire like Cedric and have his father character in this movie be rather straight laced and conservative. Great - yes, let's smooth over all the rough edges that make this comic interesting. Of course, the minute a gag needs him to be leering and lewd, he does. There is no character reality in ANY of the characters. Lame, obvious gags unfold like you are watching an old vaudeville routine or a Popeye cartoon. They're good, Steve Harvey's bad, so let's watch what happens. Also, there is a TERRIBLE subplot where a guy is basically stalking Cedric's wife - Vanessa Williams. And at the end when the guy shows up at the family reunion in a huge semi and basically runs over the reunion - he gets out with flowers and claiming his love for Cedric's wife. So what happens. Well, Cedric's Momma - you know those heavy set chuckling mommas that Hollywood movies have to have - well, she walks up and slugs the stalker in the face - he gets knocked out and that is their solution to the problem. Yes,let's forget that he will eventually wake up and probably be even more adamant to bother the woman but what the heck - violence solves everything - especially when it's one of those funny one punch, quick knockout punches. Hee hee. And of course, at the end everyone changes and learns a lesson not because it has been written that way for these characters to develop but only because it is the end of the movie and time for this stuff to happen anyway. So false, so not funny. Awful.