Any Navy SEAL is equipped with the latest in "freedom-fighting" gadgetry. Straps, pockets and belts hold guns, grenades and various homing devices. The primary visual gag in The Pacifier involves one SEAL on a top-secret baby-sitting mission who retrofits his weapon-holders to keep baby formula and diapers at the ready. In this movie, bottle fatigue is akin to battle fatigue.
Disney's new family flick is chipper and occasionally clever as it sends up the high-tech know-how required by 21st-century parents. In this case, a professor who has invented a mysterious microchip dies at the hands of terrorists. With the victim's wife away on a mission of her own, the government sends in a one-man security force: the fearless Shane Wolfe is deemed adaptable enough to serve this fatherless family.
Playing the special-ops warrior with a heart-thawing assignment, Vin Diesel turns his thuggish frown upside down and lends his nasal hoarseness to a cloying lullaby. In that sense and many others, the action-picture hero's image-modifying role looks much like the former gangsta rapper Ice Cube's recent road-trip-with-kids movie Are We There Yet? or the craggy Tommy Lee Jones' latest mission as a protector of cheerleaders in Man of the House.
PHOTO: AP
Diesel could not have succeeded as a genre-switcher without the proven television talents of the film's able ensemble. Brittany Snow, the teenage star of American Dreams, plays the eldest daughter, who at first is Shane's in-house enemy Number 1. ("Whoa. Personal bubble invasion!" she yells when he comes in close to chastise her bratty behavior.) Faith Ford of Hope & Faith and Lauren Graham of The Gilmore Girls give an Ivory-girl glow to the cast's maternal figures.
Carol Kane of Taxi, as a messy nanny, and Brad Garrett of Everybody Loves Raymond, as a Barney Fife-ish vice principal, clown it up as feckless scoundrels and come to rather sadistic ends.
The film, directed by Adam Shankman (Bringing Down the House), suggests that children should talk about their grief and show respect for overtaxed parents. But its prevailing lesson, one that will instruct children in the audience and delight their ticket-buying parents, is the value of discipline.
"We're gonna do it my way -- no highway option," the commando commands when child-stoked chaos threatens his domain. Soon the children fall in line. With practice they start enjoying the results of exercise routines, commitments to personal goals and shows of force against bullies.
For those without children to pacify, however, two afternoon hours in the theater for this parable might feel misspent. As Diesel instructs his lollygagging charges: "You're burning daylight. Now move!"
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