111 min | PG | May 13, 2022 | Roadside Attractions
Two suburban families pack up for a week at a Christian retreat called Camp Katokwah, where the cabins have no plumbing and the dads have something to prove. The Ackermans want connection. The Sanderses want to win. Faith-based comedy rarely aims this low and still misses.
Family Camp drops two households into a week of forced wilderness fellowship at a Christian summer camp. Grace and Tommy Ackerman arrive overscheduled and disconnected, hoping a week off the grid will reset their marriage and their kids. They get assigned to share a cabin with the Sanders family, who treat camp like a competition to be dominated. The film stakes its premise on a simple idea. Strip away the phones and the routines and people are forced to actually look at each other. It is a sermon about presence delivered as a slapstick comedy, and the two modes never fully agree on what they are doing.
Leigh-Allyn Baker plays Grace as the parent holding the family together by sheer scheduling, and she lands the small moments of exhaustion better than the big ones. Tommy Woodard plays Tommy Ackerman as a dad whose flop sweat is the whole joke, and the performance leans on mugging where it needs restraint. Eddie James gives Eddie Sanders a relentless alpha-camper energy that works as a foil and wears thin as a character. Gigi Orsillo plays Victoria Sanders with a brittle composure that hints at a more interesting story the film never opens. The kids, Jacob Wade and Cece Kelly among them, are asked to react rather than act, and they do it pleasantly enough. The cast is amiable. The script gives them types instead of people.
Brian Cates directs from a script he wrote with Rene Gutteridge, and the filmmaking stays as flat as the message is earnest. The camera frames the camp in bright, even daylight that flattens every scene into the same untroubled glow, so the woods feel like a set rather than a place anyone could get lost in. The editing rushes the comic beats and then lingers on the emotional ones, which inverts the rhythm a comedy needs. Cates clearly knows his audience and shoots for warmth over wit. The production design dresses Camp Katokwah in cheerful signage and rustic props, but the look never finds a joke or an image worth remembering.
This is a film that wants to tell parents to put the phone down and be there, and it cannot stop telling them in the broadest possible terms. The gags are gentle. The conflicts resolve on schedule. Every lesson arrives pre-chewed and on time, which leaves nothing for the audience to discover on its own. Cates builds a tidy, well-meaning movie for families who already agree with it, and the comfort is exactly the problem. A camp movie should feel a little dangerous, a little out of control. This one never breaks a sweat.