Cheaper by the Dozen 2 opens today, and while I did write a brief review of the first film two years ago, I haven’t got much to say about the new one. I do, however, want to comment on one tiny detail.
I appreciate the fact that this film has characters saying “Oh my goodness” and “Oh my gosh” instead of “Oh my God.” But the film’s carefulness in this area does make it all the more disappointing when, later on, a random bystander barks the phrase “Sweet Jesus!” at the sight of one man putting his arm around another man.
I’m not sure if we are supposed to take this particular comment as a mere passing profanity (which would be bad enough, thankyouverymuch, and I’d have been happier if I hadn’t had to hear it, especially with my imaginary kids in tow), or if we are supposed to believe that the person in question really has the real Jesus on the brain (which would arguably be even worse, since it would mean the film’s only token Christian is explicitly identified with homophobic bigotry). But either way, it ain’t good.
Of course, there’s nothing really gay going on when the man puts his arm around the other man. It’s all just a big misunderstanding. It’s the sort of thing that happened to Danny Kaye and Dana Andrews on a public bus in Up in Arms back in 1944, when they wanted to talk to Dinah Shore and Constance Dowling but couldn’t be seen fraternizing with women of higher military rank, and so they pretended to be talking to each other, instead.
FWIW, I believe that scene was criticized by Vito Russo in The Celluloid Closet, and I know some critics said that a similar scene in Bad Boys II (2003), which also ended with a person barking the word “Jesus”, was “homophobic”, too — but Cheaper by the Dozen 2 director Adam Shankman is a gay man, so there’d presumably be nothing homophobic about this variation on that old gag.
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