Family Weekend

Don't let the innocuous title fool you. Family Weekend is a subversive little comedy in which a tightly wound misfit of a teenage girl, fed up with watching her family spiral out of control, subjects her parents to an extreme intervention.

The unconventional dysfunctional family has now become a Hollywood convention. It is familiar to a fault.

For a long while, director Benjamin Epps goes for breakneck farce; at its best, this is a batty mixture of family-values editorial and teen spoof.

We're sitting there, trapped. An angry little teenager's yelling at us. And we're not having any fun at all.

The script, by Matt K. Turner, is loaded with contradictions, its hollow flirtation with subversion amount to airplane pablum.

What keeps the film afloat is the buoyant young cast, with Rulin especially watchable as the tightly wound lead and Joey King as her younger sister, who's an aspiring actress.

Watching "Family Weekend" you feel as trapped as the tied-up parents, wondering, when will it all end?

A couple twists short of a good comedy; this film seems like more of a TV prime time test spin for the cast and crew than a fully developed film.

Family Weekend is just as simpy as its plot sounds, but under Alabama-born director Epps, making his feature directing debut, this comedy skips along on good intentions with actors who put more into the characters than they deserve.

An enjoyably leftfield oddball comedy.

Anarchic, silly, witless, cartoonish and unsophisticated despite lively performances by the talented Olesya Rulin and Joey King.

Teen tries to repair dysfunctional family in so-so comedy.