My review of Daddy Day Camp

Before watching Daddy Day Camp I was actually quite excited. I had found the original enjoyable enough and had thought that Adam Sandler was actually quite good in it. Then I remembered that the film I was thinking of was Big Daddy and that I’d never actually seen the first in the series of Daddy Day insert word beginning with C here.

It was a good thing that this epiphany had dawned on me before the titles to Daddy Day Camp had started to roll – imagine how disappointed I would have been, waiting for gormless and samey (yet at the same time unusually charismatic) Adam Sandler to appear, to find that guy from Boat Trip and a less overweight John Goodman rip-off fill my screen instead. I think the shock may have been too much to cope with.

But even this simple realisation couldn’t have prepared me for the torture I was about to endure. Daddy Day Camp is about two guys that don’t want to let their sons go to a day camp because one of them (the one from Boat Trip) was bullied there when he was younger, so they decide to build and run a camp themselves. That’s right – BUILD.

They could have just spent more time looking at other camps, looking over the facilities and investigating their previous history. They could have even asked their sons which camps they wanted to go to. But then, of course, Hollywood wouldn’t have been able to make such a shit film. So they build a camp instead.

And of course it’s rubbish, the kids don’t enjoy it and everything goes wrong. And then the next day loads of the kids have gone to another camp across the forest where they ride quadbikes and swim and actually have fun. And then the smart arse badly acted leader of the ‘better’ camp challenges the guy from Boat Trips camp to an Olympia or something. But they can’t win because their kids are such pussies. So they recruit the help of the guy out of Boat Trip’s father (who just so happens to be an ex-army corporal) to help them. But they have father son relationship issues and ….OH MY GOD suddenly I’ve zoned out and I’m just waiting for the film to finish. I’ve become so depressed by watching this film that I’m actually starting to feel disappointed in myself for sitting there and continuing to watch it. I’m actually devastated.

Maybe I’m being too harsh - I have spent the last few months watching films made by great auteurs such as Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick after all. Maybe I should just teach myself to accept that some films will never stand up to others and that lowering my standards is a good way to make bad films better. I mean it’s all relative, right?!

WRONG. No Hollywood – NO. I will not be bullied into watching half arsed crap and accepting it, even if a lot of budding movie enthusiasts are. Daddy Day Camp is the reason I’ve avoided mainstream, supposedly ‘fun’ films, for the last 5 months. Never again shall I let my guard down.

Though the new Indiana Jones film does look quite good…