Worst current active movie franchises:
5. Paranormal Activity
4. Resident Evil
3. The one that reminds of Resident Evil, but isn’t. Oh yeah, Underworld.
2. Diary of a Wimpy Kid
1. (tie) Twilight, Transformers
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days was juuuuuuuust not quite awful enough to keep the franchise out of pole position. Oh the same crap happened – unnecessary embarrassment involving bodily functions, then the kid lies, commits several acts callously ignorant of his friends’ welfare and he “learns his lesson” only waaaaay after the damage has been done. You know what the difference is? Unlike the previous Diaries, I feel like Dogs Days actually gave a crap about the peril of its subject.
Let me illustrate:
Greg Heffley (Zachary Gordon) is having a lousy summer. Strange how much this plot feels like Judy Moody’s Big Remodel or whatever that thing was called … anyway, Greg discovers the key to enjoyment is avoiding his father and responsibility. That’s not a bad blueprint for teen enjoyment in general, but Greg is still the same selfish jerk we met in the first two movies, hence, he has to take it too far. Here he is hanging out at the country club pool where he has abused his friend Rawley’s guest privileges. In fact, Rawley (Robert Capron) stopped letting Greg come as a guest three scenes ago because Greg abused Rawley’s parents at their vacation home. In an effort to impress the Uptown girl at the club, player Greg scales the high dive where he finds a new friend, Acrophobia. Unfortunately, the script called for his ascent to be followed by a trash-talking eight-year old girl and thus Greg is forced to jump.
I mentioned this was a Diary of Wimpy Kid film, right?
Here’s where that standard Diary film part comes in: Greg slips on the high dive and loses his suit which clings to the edge of the plank. This is, of course, physically impossible. You could recreate this scene 1,000 times with a breakaway swimsuit and not find the 
same result. So there Greg is in the deep end, naked under water at a suddenly crowded pool. This moment by itself guarantees a negative review – it exists only to humiliate the protagonist which is hardly necessary and not terribly funny. When gargantuan beast Patty (Laine MacNeil) shows up at that moment, I fully expected this scene to end in abject horror. What separates Dog Days from its predecessors is that this version failed to coronate the humiliation, parade it down a red velvet aisle and have it give a speech endearing itself to “God Save the King” singing masses. Instead, Greg spent three hours in the pool and then summoned a towel boy come closing. The worker bee is holding towels, actual real live fully fluffy, non-transparent towels and yet Greg has him collect the bottom half of an adolescent girls’ bikini. You’ll have to believe me when I say this conclusion is, actually, a huge improvement over the previous two films.
Steve Zahn gets a much meatier role in this Diary. As Greg’s father, he inserts bad life lessons and disappointing looks in between scenes of “humor.” In other words, he delivers schlock, then shtick. Greg and dad have a running gag where they rip on a bad cartoon in the newspaper. I suppose this is for any of us who deal with Cathy, Luann or The Family Circus on a daily basis. I’d love to criticize this – you’re going to present something as lousy humor in contrast to what? The multitude of humorless scenes in the movie? When you think about it, however, these are the only real moments in the trilogy. Here are a dad and a son bonding over something real, something tangible, something small. Life doesn’t have to be about pointing and laughing when one is accused of peeing in a public pool.
Greet third-film Greg and by now you must know he’s a jerk.
Spends the summer comping freebies and lying a lot about work
“Awful! Horrendous!” You say “What an ingrate!”
Truth is, comparatively, it doesn’t even rate.
Rated PG, 94 Minutes
D: David Bowers
W: Maya Forbes & Wallace Wolodarsky
Genre: Awful franchise
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Children without empathy. Ahhh! Zombie kids! Run!
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Somebody who hated the first two in the series. i.e. me.
