Are We There Yet, might have been more appropriately entitled "Is It Over Yet?" In fact I'd probably feel sorry for Ice Cube for having been wrangled into taking part in this ex-rapper-on-the-road pile-up, had I not noticed his name in the production credits. Showing evidence that "Amerikkka's Most Wanted" was complicit in this attempt to turn the Erstwhile XXX action-star into America's Most Cuddly.

In this Johnson Family Vacation-caliber debacle, Ice plays Nick Persons, a player (whose credo includes an abject distaste for the shorties) who drives a pimped-out Navigator designed exclusively to attract the opposite sex so that he might have plenty of it. His latest conquest (Nia Long) unfortunately comes complete with the kind of baggage that Nick would prefer to strap to the roof of his beloved ride. Hence the table is set for Nick to get a healthy dose of comeuppance and for the rest of us to wish we'd waited in the car ourselves.

Early on in his courtship of Long, Ice Cube is pressed into service when an emergency dictates that he must drive her children (11-year-old Lindsay played by Aleisha Allen, who was so charming in School of Rock, and a much younger Philip Daniel Bolden) from Oregon to Vancouver so they can be safely re-united with their mother. This formula for disaster, could well have been an entertaining road movie, but what transpires is a painfully un-funny and surprisingly mean-spirited exercise in bad film making.

For their part, the children are motivated to make any new man in their mother's life a living hell, because they believe that the separation of their parents is temporary. We find out, however, that the kid's real father has already settled into a new romance, that comes complete with a whole new family. He's not going to be coming back, but this is a detail that their mother has yet to confess in any way. Thus, their efforts to protect their parents marriage from any and all threats, is sincere, however misguided and ultimately as doomed as this really, really bad excuse for a family film.

Right away I deeply regretted bringing my similarly aged children with me to see Are We There Yet? because the children in this film are depicted as shameless and unrepentant brats. The gags and pratfalls that they subject Ice to are so sadistic (think Home Alone) that the film caused me to wince throughout for a host of reasons. In Home Alone the violence unleashed on Stern and Pesci was easy to swallow because they were bad guys trying burglarize the home or worse. In Are We There Yet, we get the same sort of exaggerated violence, but it is meted out against an innocent who is merely trying to help. A fact that not only detracts heavily from the film, but is also a terrible message for the kids in the audience of this (PG) rated family film.

Along with the thorough thrashing both Ice Cube and his Navigator are handed, is the unquestionable damage this may well bring to bear on his career. Cube had seemed almost bullet-proof, when you consider his Friday and Barbershop franchises, not to mention his Player's Club project and his musical career. Are We There Yet, will fast be forgotten as a really lousy movie and with any luck Ice Cube will be able to soldier ahead and shrug it off as minor battle lost on his way to winning the war.