It’s hard to hit the tone just right in a comedy targeted for adolescent boys. If you go too heavy into the potty humor you lose the affection of parents who are buying the tickets, and if you go too cheesy they just sit and roll their eyes. The first Diary of a Wimpy Kid got the tone pretty much dead on, but it suffered in nearly every other respect in its writing and its lead child actor Zachary Gordon was still learning the ins and outs of comedic timing. Tepid critical response wasn’t enough to slow box office though, and Fox rammed a sequel through a quick production schedule to capitalize on the original film’s moderate success. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules definitely would have benefitted from a longer incubation period as it misses all the major beats left and right with only the performances of Devon Bostick, Rachael Harris, and Steve Zahn keeping it from total disaster.
In an ill-fated effort to foster synergy between their eldest two sons, the Heffley parents (Harris and Zahn) institute a cash reward policy granting both Rodrick (Bostick) and Greg (Gordon) a dollar for each hour they spend together harmoniously. Ever the opportunist, Rodrick takes advantage of the situation as Greg gets pulled along for the ride from a poorly planned party in their parents’ absence to a healthy dose of fraternal advice that gets Zachary into heaps of trouble. Can Zachary get out from under his older brother’s thumb and repair the damage? Or does, as the title suggests, Rodrick rule?
Whether Rodrick rules or not has less to do with the writing of the film and more to do with Bostick who seems remarkably talented in comedy for his age. Gordon has improved from the first film, but he’s still struggling to hold his ground against Bostick who still occasionally slips under the mediocrity of the script but for the most part makes his antics rise above the clumsy delivery the writing demands. With both Steve Zahn and Rachael Harris anchoring the film as parents very much aware of who their kids are and how they act, the film doesn’t collapse entirely into nonsensical kiddy anarchy that would have genuinely ruined everything, but they’re absent far too much from the screen and consequently the time is divided between Bostick or Gordon and his sidekick Rowley, portrayed by the overly hammy Robert Capron. To Capron’s credit, he’s only doing what he’s told and it’s not his fault that his entire character plays to the fact that he’s a heavy-set kid who consequently gets stuck in physical comedy bits that just don’t work.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules made a wise choice in placing Bostick at the center of a majority of the film, unfortunately the writing took slight a dive between the original and its sequel. Kids who read the books and feel compelled to see the movie might find more to enjoy considering their investment, but for anyone else giving it a try, the plot will seem aimless and the good jokes few and far between. Rodrick Rules is proof that sequels require a little bit of tuning before they’re pushed to market so that studios can take stock of what really worked in the original and what didn’t. Fox didn’t do that here and the film and audiences suffer accordingly.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
The combo set includes the film on Blu-ray, DVD and as a digital copy, with all of the extras exclusive to the Blu-ray disc. A basic but not all too enlightening audio commentary featuring Director David Bowers and the books’ author Jeff Kinney might be the most substantial extra, whereas the rest are very typical and ho-hum featurettes like deleted scenes, a gag reel, a pointless alternate ending, and a series of character-devoted shorts on the subject of “My Summer Vacation” which are cute but as vapidly written (if not more so) than the feature itself.
"Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules" is on sale June 21, 2011 and is rated PG. Comedy. Directed by David Bowers. Written by Gabe Sachs, Jeff Judah. Starring Devon Bostick, Rachael Harris, Robert Capron, Steve Zahn, Zachary Gordon.
