The Pacifier (2005)
Directed by Adam Shankman
Navy SEAL Shane Wolfe is handed a new assignment: Protect the five Plummer kids from enemies of their recently deceased father -- a government scientist whose top-secret experiment remains hidden in the kids' house.
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What that translates to is the kids finding success — from selling Girl Scout cookies to staging The Sound of Music — by employing his Marine methods.
The Pacifier frequently references The Sound of Music, and perhaps that analogy is fitting, for both movies are essentially about an outsider walking in to a single-parent, large brood family and changing it for the better.
Seth does not refute this, prompting Shane to tail him afterschool to his supersecret hangout: the local rep house, where he's rehearsing "The Sound of Music".
Despite some peripheral spy stuff, Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant's script is primarily interested in reimagining a hulking he-man as a cuddly, studly metrosexual equally adept at humiliating a cocky vice-principal (Brad Garrett) during an after-school wrestling match and directing a stage production of The Sound of Music.
Director Adam Shankman and writers Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant have lots of fun with "The Pacifier's" premise, and they run with it — even getting away with Wolfe taking over the direction of a community theater production of "The Sound of Music."
From there, it wasn't such a big leap to Arnold and Kindergarten Cop and now, God help us, The Pacifier, a yawn-by-numbers romper-room dud that is nevertheless shrewd enough to tweak its star, Vin Diesel, for becoming a joke in less time than it took him to become an action hero.
It's Kindergarten Cop by way of Three Men and a Baby (with a little Home Alone cartoon violence thrown in for good measure), with Diesel as a military man whose hard nose slowly softens when he is charged with the protection of a fallen comrade's family.
The film�s antecedents are Kindergarten Cop and Mr. Mom, with Shane�s granite machismo (Diesel even looks sort of phallic) yielding to the cockle-warming force of the adorable moppets as he protects them from terrorists and a bullying vice-principal (Brad Garrett).
Vin Diesel's bid to follow in Arnold Schwarzenegger's massive footsteps has reached the Kindergarten Cop stage.
The Pacifier sounds like the worst parts of Mrs. Doubtfire and Kindergarten Cop, yet director Adam Shankman ( Bringing Down the House ) and writers Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant (the guys behind the flop Taxi ) put together an amiable and sometimes amusing movie.
PAC-MAN inventor Professor Iwatani cameos in the arcade prologue (as does "Ghostbuster" Dan Aykroyd) and is played by Denis Akiyama ("The Pacifier," "Repo Men") in a New York City set scene homaging 50's sci-fi, then forgotten.