Yours, Mine and Ours didn’t need to be remade in the first place but nonetheless has been; it's a cute family film that unfortunately pales in comparison to the original 1968 version starring Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda.
The Film
A widowed Coast Guard Admiral who likes order and a tight ship falls in love and marries a free-spirited widow handbag designer, much to the dismay of her 10 and his 8 children.
Unlike the original, the two parents have met before and were in fact high school sweethearts, which helps explains their hasty marriage a bit better in today’s world. The new version also tries to explain the fact that Rene Russo’s character has 10 children and still looks the way she does by having several of her children adopted from foster care, thus adding another new element to the film, diversity, and more mismatched children.
Basically like the recent remake of Cheaper by the Dozen, Yours, Mine and Ours is another "too many out-of-control children in one big loving home" story. Whereas the original focused on both the parents' love, and the children-trying-to-like-each-other stories effectively, this film only dabbles in both and fails to create a whole package, instead relying on slapstick and child high-jinx for humor. It’s important to note that the movie is produced by Nickelodeon, thus the focus on the kids.
Another twist is that the children from both sides of the family work together to try to break up their parents in order to go back to their own households, but predictably form alliances in the process. The children are all, of course, adorable and good child actors -- I was pretty impressed with that part actually -- and Rene Russo and Dennis Quaid can and have done anything, so it’s not surprising that they were good in their roles. However they were only "good" and could have been much better. This could be due to the fact that the film focused more heavily on the children than their relationship and character development. I was expecting the more charming Dennis Quaid, whom we saw in yet another family film remake, The Parent Trap, instead he just reacts and flounders in this film much like Steve Martin in Cheaper By The Dozen. The film also fails to explain Rene Russo’s free-spirited character very well.
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