Alexander And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Based on its poster, trailer and obnoxiously overlong title (bound to be mispronounced by nearly every customer at the box-office), I expected "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day" to be a painfully unfunny disaster.

Fortunately, while the film isn't necessarily good, it's not nearly the train wreck I expected it to be. Overall, it's a harmless, serviceable piece of family-friendly fluff, filled to the brim with set pieces comprised of goofy slapstick while simultaneously conveying a solid amount of heart. Kids will eat up every relentlessly silly moment of it.

The plot, which plays out like a Disneyfied version of "Liar Liar" (1997), tells the story of Alexander Cooper (Ed Oxenbould), an awkward pre-teen misfit who lives through one bad day after another while all of the other members of his family seem to have everything going their way, to the point where they've become repugnantly optimistic narcissists.

A few minutes after midnight on his twelfth birthday, Alexander makes himself a sundae, wishing that both his parents and his siblings could understand what it's like to live through a rough day as he blows out the candle placed within the center of his dessert.

The next morning, everyone in the family, apart from Alexander, sleeps through their alarms, and their day only continues to spiral downward from there.

Alexander's father, Ben, (Steve Carrell) butchers an important job interview. Kelly (Jennifer Garner), the mother of the household, is punished for a detrimental typo in a children's book that's distributed through her publishing company. The jockey older brother, Anthony (Dylan Minnette) destructively fails his driver's exam, while the diva-esque sister, Emily (Kerris Dorsey) gulps down too much cough syrup before debuting as Peter Pan in a school play, and the baby of the family, Trevor (portrayed by the adorable set of twins, Elise and Zoey Vargas) ends up sucking on a green permanent marker.

Kooky physical hijinks ensue, all of which are presented within the squeaky-clean boundaries of its PG-rating. Nearly every single one of these gags are predictably executed, but as juvenile as they are, they all circle back to the theme that everyone makes mistakes once in a while, and it's not the end of the world. As Alexander states in one scene towards the climax of the film, "...you gotta have the bad days so you can love the good days even more."

Sure, this message isn't exactly groundbreaking for a children's film, and it's been conveyed in countless other movies aimed at their demographic. Still, it's hard to beat up a film whose motive is merely to charm youngsters while reminding them of this important fact that even I as an adult need to remind myself of every now and then.

Based on Judith Viorst's 1972 children's book of the same name (albeit updated for the millennial generation, I'm sure), "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day" isn't a film that I'd recommend to anyone below the age of twelve. It's sloppy, dopey and relentlessly schmaltzy. That being said, if you're a parent who's looking for a way to get out of the house and entertain the kids for a brief chunk of the day, you could certainly do a lot worse than this.