From its cutesy animated opening sequence to its wholly banal conclusion, "Johnson Family Vacation" brings nothing new, much less fresh to the tired "vacation-gone-awry" genre. The script is so disjointed and lazily written by writers Todd R. Jones and Earl Richey Jones that "Johnson Family Vacation" gives the actors nothing to work with but a bunch of clichés.

Parents to a brood of three, Nate and Dorothy’s oldest daughter, Nikki (Solange Knowles, Beyoncé’s baby sister) is a label queen, who’d rather be at the mall than caught dead on a family vacation. Their middle child D. J. (Bow Wow) has designs on being (what else?) a rap star. And their youngest one, Destiny (Gabby Soleil) is so adorable that she has an imaginary pet that’s hard to keep track of.

Nate packs his family into his newly souped-up, Burberry-trimmed Lincoln Navigator (minus his beloved 8-track) and hit the road. As expected, the journey quickly takes a turn for the worse as soon as the Johnson family passes the point of no quick return. Ironically, most of the problems derive not out of mere bad luck or unexpected circumstances — no, they happen entirely due to Nate’s proclivity for being a glutton for punishment. For example, in a strained subplot that goes nowhere, Nate leaves a nun stranded alongside the highway, yet picks up young, suspicious-acting hitchhiker (Shannon Elizabeth) who turns out to be a total nightmare. He willingly plays chicken with the driver of a 18-wheeler. And Dorothy continually rebuffs Nate’s self-serving attempts at reconciliation, yet it’s painfully obvious that they’ll eventually work things out.

Once they’ve reached their destination, after much trial and error, the film isn’t so much silly anymore as it is saccharine and utterly predictable. It’s all point A to point B filmmaking from start to finish. And, as funny as Cedric the Entertainer has been elsewhere, he has zero chemistry with Williams, who gives a surprisingly lackluster performance; she practically sleepwalks through the film. As for the kids, Bow Wow does his best with weak material; Knowles barely registers; yet the precocious Soleil gives an assured performance.

The filmmakers attempt to wangle one last cheap laugh out of their hopelessly predictable and uninspired material by ripping a page from 1980’s "The Blues Brothers." That last visual of the Johnson family’s SUV inadvertently serves as a metaphor for the entire film — a deconstructed mess.