Weekly round-up

>> Piggish men and crappy camp

by MALCOLM FRASER
and ANNE MARIE MARKO

3 P’tits Cochons

Quebec heartthrob actor Patrick Huard (Bon Cop, Bad Cop) makes his directorial debut with this comedic drama about three brothers navigating the treacherous waters of today’s sexy lifestyles. Mathieu (Claude Legault) is a family man who’s starting down the infidelity path with an office seductress (Mahée Paiement). Christian (Nitro’s Guillaume Lemay-Thivierge) is also married, but relations with his policewoman wife Hélène (Julie Perreault) have chilled, and he fills the void with lots of internet porn. Rémi (Paul Doucet), the eldest, most successful and seemingly responsible of the three, lectures his brothers on their wayward ways, while keeping his own salient secrets on the down-low.

An underlying theme develops that all men are pigs who never think of anything but sex. While this may indeed be true, it’s not what you’d call a boldly original premise. It’s also a bit confusing when Huard switches gears halfway through and expects us to sympathize with the brothers’ travails, when they’ve spent the whole film as dirty-dog caricatures. Add to that the fact that the women in the film are all either cock-hungry bimbos or frigid, ball-busting shrews, and you’ve got a fetid stew of stereotypes.

There’s also a subplot about their comatose mother (France Castel) that ends up going nowhere. In fact, the whole thing could have benefited from a cigar-chomping executive producer type to rein in the director’s excesses. Huard gets decent performances from his cast, but as a director he needs to get a firmer grasp on the fundamentals, or just a better script. (MF)

Daddy Day Camp

Cuba Gooding Jr. fans, you can breathe again: He’s back—and in yet another nonsensical vehicle that will undoubtedly move him further along the path to anonymity.

In this sequel to 2003’s Daddy Day Care, the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award winner replaces Eddie Murphy as resourceful, modern-day dad Charlie Hinton. This time around, Charlie’s in a bit of a pickle when his son Ben expresses interest in attending summer camp. Charlie knows he can’t justify forbidding him simply because of the traumatic and humiliating experience he suffered 30 years earlier when he lost a competition to a bully from rival Camp Canola but, naturally, he wants to make sure his son doesn’t suffer a similar fate. So how best to do this?

Well, Charlie could share the story with his son, using it as a life lesson, or he, along with his unlikely partner and portly friend, Phil, could buy the now decrepit, unoccupied camp and turn it into a fun, safe place for delicate children everywhere. And when Charlie discovers that the very same bully who creamed him all those years ago is now running the rival camp, he is more determined than ever to put Camp Driftwood back in business. Who needs functioning toilets, trained counsellors, rabies vaccines and arts and crafts supplies? There’s another triathlon at stake and this time nothing is going to stand in Charlie’s way. Not barf, urine, bees, flying poop, or even logic.

Fred “Wonder Years” Savage directs this uber-stinker. ’Nough said. (AMM)

Both films open this
Friday, Aug. 10

>> Movie Listings