Daddy Day Care

• Directed by Steve Carr
• May 9, 2003

When two fathers lose their job and have no prospects, they decide to open a daycare center to compete against an uptight academy in town.

Daddy Day Care is one of those movies that manages to be as good as it is bad. As poorly written as it is, it manages to be relatively well executed. As badly directed as it is it still manages to hold your attention. It manages to be entertaining even though you cannot understand why.

The first thing that jumps out at me about Daddy Day Care is how does this daycare center compete against what looks to be a full-fledged school? Chapman Academy, the rival business in the story, is a full-fledged school starting with preschool and terminating at some vague point after that. It’s certainly not a daycare center. Miss Gwyneth Harridan (Anjelica Houston) is not running a 9-to-5 facility for parents but rather a full-on academy. How these two very different businesses come into conflict makes no sense.

Our two heroes, Charlie Hinton (Eddie Murphy) and Phil Ryerson (Jeff Garlin), get put in their situation when their most recent product that they are attempting to market fails which leads to them and the whole health food division they work in getting fired. Who thought a vegetable-based cereal would work? I’m not talking about the fictional company Charlie works for but rather the people behind this very movie. That’s not even something that sounds plausible. Carrots and broccoli in a cereal? All I can think of is those vegetable crisp snacks being buried in milk.

Charlie is the usual career minded father neglecting his family with a very understanding wife named Kim (Regina King). Phil is the usual mild oaf you find as the sidekick. How either maintain a marriage due to their respective personality quirks is a bit questionable. They are straight out of the stock sitcom dad store with Charlie becoming a better father in the end.

I do think the Steve Zahn character of Marvin is a little bit too much of a Star Trek nerd. I’m not saying there are not guys who are very into that who could speak Klingon as much as the kid in the daycare can. But he came off as a caricature of it rather than an actual character. I know this is a comedy but being a bit of a Star Trek nerd myself it was a little hard to buy into him.

Those issues aside the movie is funny. There are some good jokes that take place because of the humorous nature of the situation. For example when Phil falls asleep and gets made up by two girls it’s rather funny even if you can tell he (the actor) is fully aware of what’s going on. He didn’t pull off being clueless that well. It’s just funny to see though. But it also is something you could find in a sitcom.

Daddy Day Care also manages to have heart. If it hadn’t that the whole movie would’ve fallen apart. It’s heartwarming when the nerd finds love as well as when Charlie starts genuinely connecting with his child. Plus our main villain of Miss Gwyneth Harridan gets a pretty good comeuppance in the end. And that’s one of the more important things. You do want to feel the villain gets their just desserts because this is a film about the little guy overcoming the big guy.

The work obsessed dad who reconnects with their children is well worn territory and there’s very little new that you can do with it. However Daddy Day Care manages to make it feel fresh yet not original. You’ll laugh and you’ll have your heartstrings touched mildly and in the end you’ll enjoy it even though as bad as it is you should not.