Genre: comedy

Johnson Family Vacation

Directed by Christopher Erskin

Written by Todd R. Jones

and Earl Richey Jones

Starring Cedric the Entertainer

and Vanessa Williams

Classification: PG

Rating: *½

Johnson Family Vacation is sure no holiday. If laughs are the currency of any comedy, then this one pays minimum wage and, worse, makes you work damn hard even for that pittance. To find a chuckle here demands the toil of a Trojan and the patience of Job. Vacation, be damned -- it's a full-time job.

Of course, the site (the Job site) is the usual cinematic assembly-line, that busy place where product gets stamped out for the Friday market. This particular item issues from the factory's vast recycling division. More precisely, it's from the subdepartment that specializes in plugging an all-black cast into a tired Hollywood formula, and then asking them to do the impossible -- to revive the moribund thing.

Here, the thing in question is the National Lampoon series of farcical getaways. You remember the deal: Goofy family goes on trip, goofy mishaps occur. This time, in lieu of Chevy Chase, we get a guy with a much bigger girth and an even better name: Cedric the Entertainer. Now Cedric can be entertaining indeed. He's a talented comic on the standup stage, which means that the feature factory is obliged to do with him exactly what it's done with so many of his predecessors: File down all his sharp edges and ease him into a shopworn role.

How's this for worn -- the bumbling-daddy part, the father-knows-worst gig. Scene 1 has our bumbler picking up a fully loaded Lincoln Navigator -- aka the movie's shameless product placement -- in preparation for a cross-country drive to the Johnson family reunion. Sadly, he and his wife (Vanessa Williams) are having a spot of domestic trouble: She wants to ply her trade as an accountant, he wants her to stay home and tend to their three kids. C'mon, what century are we in here? That bloated Lincoln may be state-of-the-art, but this plot device is a rusty Model T.

And matters get older still when the onset of the trip cues the start of the goofiness. Since this sort of comedy is designed to be episodic, we're definitely prepared to do our bit here -- to look through all the strung-together vignettes in search of the promised yuks. Now where might they be? In the opening duel with a vengeful Mack truck? In the hot tub at the fleabag motel? In the sexy hitchhiker with the pet alligator? In the smelly toilet at Bun World? Or in daddy's immortal line, "Don't worry, we're not gonna run out of gas -- trust me"?

Quick answer: No, no, no, no and no. There, happy to have saved you the labour. Beyond that, I count exactly two laughs. The first comes early in the day, and the last arrives near the end, when Cedric is momentarily freed from the straitjacket of that doltish daddy and gets to slip into another role as the leering Uncle Earl, a good-natured boor whose idea of a gallant compliment is to stare at a woman's chest and drool, "Lord, you look like a hot cup of soup and I got the flu." Hey, I chortled, an actual chortle -- then it was right back to work.