Like Father Is A Sappy Extended Advertisement For Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines

Watching a movie that can't seem to quite figure out what it is is a fascinating experience. Every movie, from Mad Max: Fury Road to A Bulldog Christmas, is such a massive undertaking requiring the help of countless human beings that it feels tragic to watch all that effort be put into the service of a movie like Like Father that's so confused about its own identity. Is this supposed to be a light-hearted comedy about a father and a daughter reuniting after many years apart? Is this supposed to be a darker drama examining the struggles of the two interacting with one another for the first time in decades? Or is Like Father simple hawking the services you can find on a Royal Caribbean cruise line? Perhaps it is all of them in addition to being underwhelming as all heck.


The daughter in this damaged father/daughter dynamic is workaholic Rachel Hamilton (Kristen Bell), who just got dumped at the altar by her boyfriend. Attending this soon to be botched wedding is Rachel's dad Harry (Kelsey Grammar), who has been absent from his daughter's life for 25 years now. Harry wants to reconnect with his daughter and decides to take the forlorn Rachel out for a night of heavy drinking to lift her spirits. Waking up after this heavily intoxicated evening, Rachel finds herself on the cruise line she was supposed to spend her honeymoon on...with her dad. Now the two of them are stuck out at sea together with no choice but to interact with one another.

Like Father serves as the directorial debut for Lauren Miller Rogen, who also wrote the script for this project. Among my many grievances with her writing here, I wish she didn't rely so heavily on montages to breeze past important developments in character arcs. The sequence depicting Harry and Rachel going out for drinks, the first time they've talked to one another in decades, should be a time for the movie to slow down so we can get to know the characters, watch how these two interact with one another and see how they gradually warm up to the other. But this pivotal scene just flashes by in the span of a quick montage that fails to explore the characters to a thoughtful degree, something the best montages are totally capable of.

Montages being used to breeze past crucial character-based moments continue to crop up throughout the film, including two back-to-back montages set to predictable upbeat 80's tunes showing Rachel and Harry having fun on the cruise ship that feel less like ways of concisely showing character growth and rather come off as a pair of rejected star-studded ads for the Royal Caribbean cruise line. These kinds of scenes suggest Like Father wants to be a breezy heartwarming tale of father/daughter reconciliation, but these two characters haven't been well-defined enough to feel all warm n' fuzzy whenever Rachel and Harry start to reconnect.

Just as Like Father struggles to nail moments that should make one happy, it also grapples with making the father/daughter conflict actually have weight. These two lead characters are so ill-defined that it's hard to get immersed in their struggles to reconnect again while Like Father also wants to get to the intended-to-be heartwarming father/daughter reunion so badly that it ends up truncating any sense of realistic nuance from why Harry left Rachel in the first place. It gets incredibly annoying just how repeatedly the movie undercuts potential new sources of conflict by letting Harry off the hook whenever possible for whatever transgressions he's committed. Exploring the complexities of what made him leave his family for so long or how this absence has affected Rachel is eschewed in favor of just making sure these two come back together in as rushed a manner as possible.

The Rachel/Harry storyline doesn't feel like an authentic depiction of a troubled parent/child relationship at all, which becomes a real pressing issue when the attempts at light-hearted sequences or humor keep coming up short. Despite having actors on hand who have excelled in handling both pathos and levity in the past like Kristen Bell and Kelsey Grammer (the latter actors excellent singing voice is, I assume, the sole reason why the climax takes place at a karaoke competition), Like Father struggles badly in trying to competently execute either a dramatic or a breezy take on its basic premise. The only thing it really succeeds in being is a grating extended advertisement for the Royal Caribbean cruise line, with numerous pieces of dialogue dedicated to highlighting various features the companies cruise ships offer while numerous establishing shots linger over elaborate breakfast buffet offerings and massive water slides. All these do is make the ship look like a distractingly perfect creation straight out of postcard rather than coming directly from reality, which at least matches the tediously immaculate way Like Father approaches its central father/daughter relationship.