Parental Guidance: Film Review

The Bottom Line

It's Grandparenthood, as Billy Crystal and Bette Midler do their best to keep this generic 

family comedy aloft.

Opens

Tuesday, Dec. 25 (20th Century Fox)

Cast

Billy Crystal, Bette Midler, Marisa Tomei, Tom Everett Scott, Bailee Madison

Director

Andy Fickman

Billy Crystal and Bette Midler hustle to peddle the threadbare material that makes Andy 

Fickman's comedy a perfectly tolerable, if uninspired, moviegoing experience.

The schmaltz is piled on thick, and if the comedy were any broader it would require an Imax 

screen, but still there's something touching about how hard Billy Crystal and Bette Midler 

hustle to peddle the threadbare material that makes Parental Guidance a perfectly tolerable, if 

uninspired, moviegoing experience.

As "the other grandparents" who are given a golden opportunity to bond with their seldom-seen 

grandchildren, Billy and Bette work double time, well aware that it's not just the juvenile 

characters they have to entertain, but also the paying audiences who could count on both of 

them for a good laugh back in the day.

That they manage to pull their weight even when the achingly formulaic plotting threatens to 

drag them under is a testament to their "let's-put-on-a-show" spirit. The end result should 

appeal to audiences, including bonding grandparents and grandkids, looking for a little 

undemanding holiday cheer.

Crystal is Artie Decker, who has just lost his longtime gig as "De Voice of the Fresno 

Grizzlies" when the minor-league baseball team decided to upgrade the outfit with the sort of 

talent that knows its way around a Facebook page or a Twitter account.    

Already despondent, he's not exactly jumping up and down over the news that he and his wife 

Diane (Midler) have been recruited to babysit their daughter Alice's (Marisa Tomei) three kids when she and her tech-geek husband Phil (Tom Everett Scott) get a last-minute opportunity to 

have some out-of-town alone time.

As expected, uptight Alice's no-sugar-allowed helicopter parenting clashes mightily with Artie 

and Diane's old-school approach to child-rearing, not to mention the fact that Phil has 

programmed his smart home to be intuitive within an inch of its inhabitants' lives.

Also as expected are the resulting gags built around technologically challenged Artie. 

Fortunately, old pro Crystal comes armed with an arsenal of rim-shot-ready rejoinders that hit 

the mark more than they miss.

While his character has been given more of an emotional arc than Midler's (unsurprising, since 

the genesis of Parental Guidance came from a newly minted grandparenting experience in producer 

Crystal's life), it's still nice to see Midler strutting her stuff in her first onscreen comedy 

role in years.

And Tomei is always a welcome presence, even when she's saddled with what's essentially a one-

note character for most of the film.

It would have been nice if director Andy Fickman (Race to Witch Mountain) and husband-and-wife 

screenwriters Lisa Addario and Joe Syracuse (Surf's Up) could have mined some fresher stuff 

from this frequently played ballgame, but at least when you've got Crystal calling the shots, 

you can still count on the occasional change-up.