Diary of a wimpy kid the long haul12/27/2023 To solve the problem, the people behind the "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" movie franchise, including director David Bowers, had to restart the entire casting process, which is said to be the most important and difficult part of making movies. "Making a fourth Wimpy Kid film with the original cast wouldn't have been possible," said Jeff Kinney, the author of the famous children's book series, as reported by The Washington Post. "The kids grew up and grew out of their roles, and we knew we'd hit the end of the road with them." However, the big change-up was essential for the film to push through. The question is: Why was the original cast replaced?Ī lot of viewers who were used to seeing the original cast were not quite comfortable watching different faces on the big screens. It’s a shame Bowers and co-screenwriter Kinney couldn’t strike this note more often."Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul" features a new set of faces, with Jason Drucker starring as main character Greg Heffley, Charlie Wright as Greg's older brother Rodrick, and Tom Everett Scott and Alicia Silverstone as their parents. But in the film’s best gag-a running bit about Greg finding Internet fame after a video of him with a diaper stuck to his hand goes viral-they manage to split the difference between these two tendencies, finding a happy medium between the scatological and the satirical. Such details suggest a potentially rich comedic vein that the filmmakers only briefly tap into, preferring instead to indulge in tried-and-true methods of rambunctious slapstick. The Long Haul is peppered with observations about the role of technology in contemporary kids’ lives, including Greg’s idolization of a PewDiePie-like gaming personality named Mac Digby (Joshua Hoover) and the withdrawal symptoms the family faces when Greg’s mom, Susan (Alicia Silverstone), forbids them from using any devices on their road trip. One inspired set piece-a Rube Goldberg-style chain of mishaps that keeps distracting Greg’s dad, Frank (Tom Everett Scott), from an important phone call-demonstrates Bowers’s capability of pulling off well-oiled comedic escalation, but this choice moment of lunacy only serves to throw the haphazardness of the rest of the film into sharper relief. With its wispy plotline and sketchily drawn characters, the film leans heavily on out-sized slapstick to fill in the gaps, to mostly frenzied and lead-footed effect. A fart gag can be funny, but Bowers’s listless direction and slack comic timing drains the energy out of the script’s already underwritten punchlines. While the vulgarity of such gags is sometimes off-putting, the fundamental problem with The Long Haul, the latest film based on Jeff Kinney’s popular book series, isn’t so much the grossness of its humor as the laziness with which it’s executed. Set during a disastrous cross-country road trip taken by the wimpy Greg (Jason Drucker) and his family, the film features more than its share of bodily excretions, including Greg peeing into a plastic bottle in front of his whole family, a piglet’s poop befouling the air of the family van, and CGI puke splashing onto a man’s face inside a Gravitron. Roger Ebert once argued that the devolution of children’s entertainment from the Lassie films to the crude slapstick of See Spot Run suggested that “the national taste is rapidly spiraling down to the level of a whoopee cushion.” Indeed, it’s true that gags involving urine, excrement, and vomit are practically de rigueur for comedies targeted at the elementary-school set, and David Bowers’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul is certainly no exception.
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