Out of all the flaw and defect not surprisingly, Bonnie Hunt and Steve Martin make out like bandits here. Throughout all the cheese, Martin and Hunt have some really good chemistry together as a couple and are just fun to watch. Hunt and Martin have a knack for weirdness and neuroses, and manage to make due with a pretty crappy and cheesy script which calls for all the usual dialogue between couples without an inch of originality, but with all of their neurotic wonder, they're a lot of fun to watch together, and that's the reason for giving this movie even an inch of credit to its name.

Oh boy is this a hard movie to sit through, and more times than none, it can be pretty damn stupid. My main gripe with the movie are the kids. As with any kids movie we have to sit through a bunch of toddler actors who shouldn't even be acting, but are cute, no not really, so why are they in this? We have a huge cast of no-name kids and a few I've
seen time and again on rare occasions. But damn, these kids are unbearable.

We never get the sense that this family is very close because the writers are too wrapped up in showing the mayhem and madcap hilarity in kids with behavior disorders for the sake of comedy. I live in a big family myself and this movie rings true, but we also settle down, there's quiet in the house some of the time, and we're hardly ever comical. These kids are basically tools for comedy and are meant to be cute, and that's the problem: the kids are too cutesy, and clever for their own good, too outspoken, too disorderly, and unorganized, and they don't have their own personality, not to mention they're really annoying, and sometimes they can be unbearably obnoxious, and they're all really the basic cliches included by studios and screenplays to reach out to all the audiences hoping for one kid in the audience to go "That's like me!" or "He/She's like my brother/sister!"

They're just concepts of characters, never characters. There's the fashion loving shallow blonde, the oldest rebellious brother, the twins (three sets), the chubby kid, the sassy outspoken tomboy girl, the oldest daughter seeking departure from her parents, and the youngest who isn't like everyone else (and his is the most interesting but under-developed sub-plot!), yeah, yeah we've all been here before, we've been here too much down this road. Hillary Duff is especially annoying and obnoxious performing as the usual character archetype she plays in her films, the ditzy bubble-headed blonde -- quite a stretch, eh, folks? Thank goodness her tart and flaky personality is drowned out by the kids.

Not to mention Tom Welling, a good actor despite previous reports, is underused here and he has a lot of potential yet barely has a sub-plot to hold on to. There's also Piper Perabo who has no back story, no sub-plot, no character emphasis and we know nothing about her or where she works since she's supposed to be the ambitious go-getter. And of course there's Ass-ton Kutcher who plays Piper Perabo's slacker boyfriend, and of course he's the usual screaming, riling, moronic numbskull that he plays in everything he's in. Let's thank the good movie lord that he's only a supporting character with not much of a plot. Thank you.

The film goes through the entire family and its range of whacky characters but it covers no ground in terms of character emphasis and plot. We're supposed to believe the kids are orderly (I use the term loosely) and now that the mom is gone they decide to act wild? Then they hold hands while walking to school, something no brother and sister does. I wish the parents had more of a personality as well, but not only as individuals but as a unit too. We hardly get to see them together in a long scene, and they are also cliches. Martin is the sports obsessed work driven father, and Hunt is the go-getter who doesn't spend time with her kids, but they somehow manage to run a household of twelve kids... right. Then, to make things worse, there are the villains.

Why, I ask, do there always have to be villains in a family movie? Couldn't this have focused on the family without villains? It would have saved money, and it could have used the extra time to focus on the characters. Regardless the plot continues on and on without much sense, the outcast has an amazing room he finds that none of the other kids do, which is surprising since everyone is running out of the house when they move in, they ask Hunt's character to do a book tour knowing she's devoted to her family (she wrote a book about it for goodness sake). Through out the gags and one-liners and antics, This is really just dreadful to watch at times.

This is ultimately a guilty pleasure, something to take the kids to without having to worry about them not being entertained, but this isn't a masterpiece. Sometimes it can be sweet but it's also stupid, cheesy, sappy, and the kids in the film are ghastly obnoxious, however Martin and Hunt come out unscathed with funny, and sweet performances and good chemistry.

• Based on the real life Gilbreth family. The name Gilbreth appears several times throughout the film: Nora says that it's her grandmother's name when the kids are playing the game with the apples; it's Kate's maiden name according to her yearbook; it's Kate's maiden name according to the dust jacket of her book.

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