Unless Ellen Burstyn has been running a cockfight in her spare time, this cosmically atrocious sequel to Daddy Day Care must constitute the greatest professional indignity yet visited upon a living Oscar winner.
Daddy Day Camp *
Directed by Fred Savage. Starring Cuba Gooding Jr, Paul Rae, Josh McLerran, Lochlyn Munro, Richard Gant PG cert, gen release, 89 min
True, Cuba Gooding Jr has already stomped through such mounds of putrescence as Boat Trip, Radio and Norbit, but Daddy Day Camp has that special something about it that sets it aside from ordinary, everyday rubbish.
What can it be? The fact that Eddie Murphy, star of the only mildly useless original, turned it down? The presence of child actors whose lack of charisma is so striking it almost obscures their lack of talent? The most nauseatingly glutinous treatment of Hollywood's perennial obsession with fathers and their ungrateful sons we have seen this month? It's all this and more.
Daddy Day Camp, in which the proprietors of a Californian nursery take their charges into the wilderness, has the look of an enterprise that was knocked together in one afternoon by people with too many other things on their minds.
Where can Gooding go from here? Maybe some kind fan, eager to get the actor's career back on track, will find a Golf Sale sign for him to hold. Better that than Daddy Day Care III.
