Ask any parent who they’d most like to bludgeon to death with a Hatchimal and odds are good that Tom Lichtenheld and Amy Krouse will come up as viable targets. The pair’s 2009 children’s book, Yes Day!, first introduced kids (and despairing caregivers) to the concept of this time-limited parental amnesty, during which the answer to any request (Can we have Wagon Wheels for breakfast? Are we allowed to drink maple syrup? Can we dye the cat orange?) must be met with a sobbed affirmative.
While the picture-led book is largely plotless, the film, directed by Cedar Rapids’ Miguel Arteta, attempts to expand its chaotic premise. We are introduced to Allison (Jennifer Garner) and Carlos Torres (Edgar Ramirez): once a pair of fun-loving twentysomethings, now frazzled parents to three demanding kids. After middle child Nando (Julian Lerner) turns in a school project comparing his buzzkill mother to Mussolini (surely deserving of at least a week on the naughty step), she foolishly agrees to the aforementioned day of carnage in order to re-assert her fun-mum credentials.
Aimed squarely at the audience’s pre-tween contingent, the film lacks sass or snappy dialogue.
Unsurprisingly, what begins as a touching story of parent-child bonding soon descends into a wild Saturnalia of competitive eating, paramilitary water-ballooning, fist-fights over toy gorillas and even a brief stint in jail. But while there’s undoubtedly comedy kindling in the set-up, Justin Malen’s (Office Christmas Party) disappointingly bland script stubbornly refuses to catch fire. Aimed squarely at the audience’s pre-tween contingent, the film lacks sass or snappy dialogue, subbing in broad situational riffs (too much ice cream leads to diarrhoea! Unattended kids will trash your home!) that never conjure the wit or charm to convert familial pandemonium into laughs.
Even Garner — an advocate of Yes Days, having enshrined them as a real-life family tradition back in 2012 — can’t rescue this from banality. Throwing herself into the role with an admirable lack of restraint, Garner just about manages to shepherd it to a wholesome and fluffy conclusion complete with a ‘cool’ music festival so lethargic they must have been doling out ketamine by the wheelbarrow.