Coupe De Ville

When producer Joe Roth was named head of Walt Disney Studios in 1998, he was always cited as the first studio head who had also worked as a movie director. What no one ever seemed to mention is that Roth was a wholly mediocre moviemaker, as evidenced by this film and his other two titles (including Revenge of the Nerds 2). This formula comedy, set in the summer of 1963 (which, as everyone knows, was the summer before America lost its innocence with the Kennedy assassination), is about three brothers whose tyrannical father (Joseph Bologna) commands them to jointly drive a brand-new Cadillac from Detroit to Florida, where Dad will present it to their mom as a birthday present. And God help them if they get so much as a scratch on it. The brothers--an uptight control freak (Daniel Stern) and two variously goofy types (Arye Gross and Patrick Dempsey)--have never gotten along. You can see where this one's heading before the car even gets out of Michigan. --Marshall Fine