Are We There Yet? (2005)

The 2005 road comedy arrives with a premise that has not aged into anything more dignified: a bachelor entrepreneur volunteers to transport two children 350 miles in a Lincoln Navigator to impress their mother. Ice Cube plays Nick with the aggrieved patience of a man who has been assured the trip will take six hours. It does not. The film's cultural posture deserves cataloguing, if only because it is so nearly blank. A predominantly Black cast anchors a mainstream studio family comedy, and the picture treats this as unremarkable, which is either progress or simply a Tuesday. Race is never mentioned. Nobody remarks on it. The storytelling is colorblind to the point of incuriosity.

Politics are absent. Nick runs a sports memorabilia shop and adores his new SUV, and the film's attitude toward both is reverent consumerism, so no economic critique surfaces. No environmental message attaches to the conservation area, which exists so a deer can attack a man. Kevin's asthma is a plot device, not a statement about neurological difference. There is no historical revision, no body politics, no queer presence of any kind. Nia Long's Suzanne is a divorced working mother holding down a career, and Lindsey is a stubborn daughter, which registers as a faint feminist pulse. It beats quietly and then stops.

The lessons about family and trust do arrive, but through pratfalls, groin injuries, and a vomiting child, so the sermonizing never quite lands. Critics mauled the thing and it collected $97.9 million regardless, which tells us more about 2005 than any of its themes do. It is a machine for occupying children in the back seat, and it succeeds at that. Classification is straightforward: a product of its moment, not ahead of it, and largely indifferent to the questions we now insist on asking of such material.