Starring Ice Cube and Nia Long. Rated general.

From angry rapper to sitcom-styled family man in 10 short years. What would Martin Luther King, Jr. say about Ice Cube? Would he ask if he's there yet, or if this is where anyone should be going?

Basically a rehash (with emphasis on the hash) of Johnson Family Vacation, this committee-built effort--and Mr. Cube himself is listed as one of the producers--is brainless, mostly painless stuff. It also shows that Vancouver can be more convincing as every other corner of the Northwest than it is at being itself, given that this is the putative destination of the MC-turned-actor's generically named character.

Nick Persons, owner of a Portland sports-collectible shop, has a thing about children. He doesn't like them. "They're like cockroaches, but you can't squish 'em," he says early on, with his manner suggesting that he may, eventually, modify his position. The modifier here is Suzanne (Nia Long), the lovely event organizer at the office across from Nick's shop. Problem? She's a recent divorcée with two young children.

As played by School of Rock's Aleisha Allen and eight-year-old TV veteran Philip Bolden, Suzanne's kids are the stuff nightmares are made of. Rest assured that vomit and urine will be spilled, groins will be kicked, and life lessons will be learned, often at the same time.

Is it giving away too much to say that Nick is anti-infant because his daddy left him in the lurch? And is the shiny new Lincoln Navigator that gets us to Vancouver (560 kilometres in three days--excellent mileage!) the same one that got trashed in Vacation?

Truth be known, the roundish Cube has become such an affable screen presence that it's hard to hold this piffle against him. His early scenes with Long have a smart chemistry that promises adult pleasures to alternate with the low-jinks. But she's soon yanked out of the story, with our horny hero then trying to get with her by cozying up to the kids on a trip up north to join her. (She isn't much more than a deus sex machina.) When Suzanne does return, at the end, the actor is the same but her character has turned into a shrieking harridan. Maybe Nick should have ditched those kids when he had the chance.