The Brady Bunch Series

The Brady Bunch Movie (January 11/15)

The fondly-remembered 1970s TV series hits the big screen with The Brady Bunch Movie, with the film following the title clan as they attempt to save their house from an unscrupulous, scheming neighbor (Michael McKean's Larry Dittmeyer). It's immediately clear that director Betty Thomas, working from a script by Laurince Elehwany, Rick Copp, Bonnie Turner, and Terry Turner, isn't looking to depart too far from the source material, as The Brady Bunch Movie essentially plays like a 90 minute episode of the television show - with the only real difference here that the Bradys are stuck in the '70s while everyone else is in the 1990s. The movie's surfeit of fish-out-of-water jokes and gags proves to be its most enjoyable element, to be sure, and there's little doubt that the filmmakers mine the title characters' cluelessness for all its worth. (It's difficult not to get a kick out of the Bradys' trip to a modern-day department store, for example.) But Thomas' unabashed reverence for the film's source material eventually grows tiresome, as there simply aren't a lot of laughs to be garnered from the ongoing emphasis on corny bits of comedy (ie only die-hard fans of the series will find most of this stuff hilarious). By the time the (underwhelming) big finale rolls around, The Brady Bunch Movie has confirmed its place as a passable adaptation that's often as forgettable as it is entertaining.

out of

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