Dan in Real Life lovable and unremarkable

A mopey retread of all the old family-comedy clichés—kids are wise; love is tough; sometimes the guy with all the answers forgets to take his own advice (can you imagine?)—Dan in Real Life isn’t a disaster. But it definitely isn’t good.

Steve Carell, lovable but unremarkable, stars as the titular Dan, a bundle of all the golden-hearted single-father clichés. Beloved advice columnist by trade, and father to three precocious girls, Dan spends his days (in real life, not fake life, in case you were confused) dispensing drippy platitudes in the newspaper, dispensing drippy platitudes in books, and dispensing drippy platitudes from his melancholy mouth. He also enjoys packing school lunches, harassing 14-year-old suitors, and forbidding his eldest from driving an automobile. “You’re a good father,” says the tiniest (and, therefore, the wisest) of the daughters, “but sometimes a bad dad.” God, I am so bored just typing this.

The story is that Dan and kids head to granny and gramps’s summer house for their boisterous annual family retreat. It’s in one of those windy, whitewashed New England coastal towns where everything’s lonely and boarded up and draped in buoys. Just like Dan. In a lonely, Atlantic, buoy-draped bookstore, Dan meets a pretty lady (Juliette Binoche), and they fall in love. For the purposes of awkwardness, this pretty lady is already taken—by Dan’s crappy brother, Dane Cook! Now and then, amid overwhelming ordinariness, Carell will say something unbearably funny, like, “This corn is like an angel to me.” Then, everything that you expect to happen happens, in a mild, inoffensive, and okay way.

Dan in Real Life would be perfect if you were home sick with the flu. It would be a good one to watch with your mom. And it’s an effective reminder of how fun it is to play touch football in the summertime with your weird cousins. Because it’s just normal, and boring, and a little bit funny. Kind of like real life.

DAN IN REAL LIFE DIR. PETER HEDGES | RATED PG-13 | AT THEATERS EVERYWHERE

Tags: dan in real life, dane cook, steve carrell, touch football