Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul (2017)

The fourth installment in the Heffley chronicles arrives with a new cast, a road trip premise, and a level of cultural ambition that can be measured in negative numbers. Here is a film in which a boy's hand becomes encased in a diaper, footage of the incident becomes a viral meme, and the entire narrative engine is his desire to be photographed beside an internet personality. There is no social thesis hiding in the ball pit. The family is white, the antagonists are white, and the lone Spanish-speaking tow truck driver exists purely so that a small child can demonstrate his fluency with a CD. We note the figure without assigning it significance. It is a gag, not a gesture.

The mother confiscates the phones and declares the trip technology-free, which is the closest the proceedings come to commentary of any kind. It reads as parenting, not sermonizing. She is controlling, exhausted, and ultimately vindicated by a script that wants hugs more than arguments. The Beardos take the place of villains, and the film extracts humor from their weight and grooming, which is neither body-positive nor especially cruel, merely lazy in the manner of a mid-tier family comedy. Race, class, sexuality, and the climate go unmentioned, unexamined, and largely unimagined. The film has no interest in the architecture of power. It has interest in a piglet.

What remains is a ninety-minute exercise in mild chaos, received with a 19 percent approval rating and a franchise-low opening weekend. The most culturally charged event surrounding it was a hashtag protesting an actor's face. That is the film's entire discourse footprint. We classify it accordingly, with the sober satisfaction of a sommelier corking a bottle nobody asked to open.