Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days (2012)

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days arrives as the third and final entry in the original live-action trilogy, a 2012 summer comedy in which a boy lies to his parents about a country club job and learns, at moderate volume, about responsibility. The plot involves a stolen tennis lesson, a disastrous camping trip, a sweet sixteen ruined by a garage band, and a mobile phone that can dial only home or emergency services. It grossed 77 million dollars against a 22 million dollar budget. That is the entire cultural record, and it is sufficient.

For those of us who catalogue social consciousness for a living, the film is a near-total blank. A minor Indian-American character, Chirag Gupta, appears among Greg's classmates without the screenplay drawing attention to him, which is either representation or simply a boy standing in a hallway. The women exist to be crushed on or to dispense sandwiches and mild disapproval, and no character questions the arrangement. There is no environmental sermon, no critique of the country club's membership fees, no reckoning with the body, the mind, or the historical record. The moral instruction is narrow and personal: do not lie to your father, and if you must deceive a lifeguard, do it quietly.

The remainder is slapstick, delivered with the enthusiasm of a golden retriever. The film is pleasant, forgettable, and innocent of any agenda beyond selling tickets to eleven-year-olds. I score it accordingly, with the solemn gratitude of a sommelier handed a glass of tap water and asked to describe the terroir.