Daddy Day Care isn't quite as awful as I expected, but it's still a formulaic, far-fetched, poorly written knock-off of the vastly superior John Hughes 80's hit Mr. Mom. The premise is practically identical to Mr. Mom (except that Eddie Murphy is an advertising exec and Mr. Mom's wife was the advertising exec). The film starts with Eddie and his wife (Regina King) shopping for day care for their young pre-school boy, only to find a surprising lack of acceptable facilities. The plot begins to boil as they visit a strictly regimented, almost military establishment ran by an anal retentive control freak played by Angelica Huston.

The young family needs to find Day Care because King is a law school grad and now that their son is old enough, she's ready to start a legal career. And by the title of the film and the trailers you've no doubt seen, finding suitable Day Care soon becomes the least of their worries as just when Mom lands a job, Daddy loses his. After a period of depression and unsuccessful job hunts the notion of starting his own Day Care facility pops up and along with his similarly jobless buddy Jeff Garlin (Curb Your Enthusiasm) they set about making this notion a reality. After a bit of misgiving on the part of many a prospective parent Daddy Day Care is up and running and of course hilarity soon ensues.

Is it funny? Not terribly. Jeff Garlin, though seemingly perfect for such a role, is surprisingly ineffective as the second banana in charge of the physical gags, (getting kicked in the kiwis, etc. etc.) Murphy is Murphy and turns in exactly the performance you would expect. Angelica Huston's character, who is bitter and vengeful about losing pupils to this sloppy upstart, is really badly drawn and she immediately sets about having Daddy Day Care put out of business through legal means. And in the films most embarrassingly bad scene, she even shows up at a fund-raiser to help Daddy Day Care expand it's facility and pulls a few cheap tricks like letting the air out of the bouncy toys and turning loose the animals out of the petting zoo - I really couldn't believe what I was seeing during this sequence. A seven year old would have edited this ridiculous footage from the film and the reason I used the expression Cheap Trick, is because they are the band who volunteer to help DDC raise money.

On the positive side of the ledger, the children in the film all do decent work, and the movie is given a little lift when Steve Zahn, (a obsessed Trekkie) joins the staff and proves to have an affinity for handling children. Mainly by dint of having read "baby doctor" Benjamin Spock's book, mistaking it for a something to do with Leonard Nemoy's Spock character. He gets more laughs than Garlin, but his introduction to the cast is akin to a guest soloist in the band that went down with the Titanic.

I watched the film with my 5 and 6 year old daughters and they found enough things to laugh about, but I kept thinking to myself that after Pluto Nash, Haunted Mansion and this film that perhaps Eddie Murphy would be a great candidate for Quentin Tarantino to write into one of his next films. It worked for Willis and Travolta, Forster and Carradine maybe it could do the same for Murphy. Shrek 2 will no doubt give him a boost, but the former superstar has, of late, fallen victim to his own law. That's a weak joke that I'll be obliged to explain . . . Murphy's Law. Bad joke, even worse film.