A mother's ruin

Half-term brings us some of the most wretched children's films ever perpetrated. Runt of the litter is the one which will probably prove the most commercially successful.

In Big Momma's House 2, Martin Lawrence 'stars' once again as an FBI agent who goes undercover by disguising himself as an old, fat woman.

Every so often, a minor character comes on screen to point at Lawrence, laugh hysterically and yell 'You're funny!' They lie.

The remarkable aspect is that none of the physical humour is even slightly amusing. Lawrence works hard, but he entirely lacks the ability to make comedy look like anything other than hard work.

Like its inexplicably popular predecessor, this sequel is full of jokes poking fun at fat people and leering at pretty girls - the thong jokes are especially inappropriate in a 'family film'.

Lawrence even thinks cruelty to animals is funny. At one point, our hero feeds a lethal amount of tequila to a chihuahua, with no ill effects except a marked improvement in its temperament.

Anyone dumb enough to attend Big Momma's House 2 is at least stupid enough to feed alcohol to defenceless pets, so vets should prepare to welcome a sudden influx of pickled, paralysed and perishing pooches.

The picture shamelessly rips off previous movies that were themselves pretty horrible - notably The Pacifier and Man Of The House.

And it's contemptible for the patently insincere way it ladles on its syrupy sentimentality. When, in the final reel, Lawrence's FBI man decides to protect from prosecution a man who's been bent on betraying his country, merely in order to safeguard the feelings of the traitor's children, you may find yourself struggling to control your gag reflex.

Abu Hamza may have eight children, but that doesn't mean he doesn't deserve to be locked up.

Mr Lawrence doesn't like critics - hardly surprising, after the clobbering he has received for such horrors as A Thin Line Between Love And Hate, the most misogynistic movie of the Nineties; the aptly titled What's The Worst That Could Happen (to which a number of us responded: Another film by Martin Lawrence); and Nothing To Lose, a glorification of racially-motivated mugging (that's the criminal kind, not the would-be comic sort in which Lawrence indulges).