Rethabile Ramaphakela’s Disaster Holiday is a strainingly unfunny dramedy on parenting. How good a parent is is assessed by the emotional lives their children are able to develop. Do they have empathy and curiosity in equal share? Are they nice to the other with sincerity and not just to earn some added leverage? How does the crunch of a job weigh on regular choices the parent would have to be cautious and mindful of?
The film measures the impact of this balance. It talks of a father who habitually fails to strike the balance. The man is forever caught in the rat race of ensuring financial stability for his family, and his kids; he completely overlooks being by their side in the daily moments. He knows he has to provide and can’t risk the tough, poverty-stricken childhood he has seen at close quarters. Moreover, he is bent on doing everything he can so that such times never show up for his kids. They have, therefore, a comfortably padded lifestyle but they yearn for their dad who’s barely present as a shoulder to fall back on.
Disaster Holiday (2024) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
How Does Joseph, Struggle with Fatherhood and Responsibility?
Kenneth Nksoi plays the father, Joseph, who is always flunking the balance of being a parent. He cannot make sense of his responsibilities. They weigh heavily against him. Joseph fails at being a reliable support system for his kids and is keen only on being the financial provider. He can’t do anything about it and is stuck. Work demands too much from him. Joseph can’t focus on the kids, using being swamped with work as an excuse.
He is perpetually caught in a tiff with his ex-wife over proper care and attending to the children. Neither are they accepting of his second wife, Lunathi Mampofu (Nandi). Joseph struggles to find the right balance between fostering a sense of family unity in his children and earning their respect as a father, despite his tendency to fall short in meeting their everyday emotional and nurturing needs. All he knows and is vigilant of is that he cannot afford to repeat the curse of his childhood, though his mother tried her best not to make the dire poverty chafe intensely against him.
Can Joseph Overcome His Fatherhood Struggles and Balance Work and Family?
Joseph has promised his kids and Nandi a vacation in Zanzibar. However, his plans run foul when his boss at the toilet paper brand rails at him about a pitch he has to deliver on the very weekend the trip is scheduled. He cannot cancel the trip either so he talks his family around on a road trip instead to Durban. His youngest daughter, Lily, who is always vanishing the minute he doesn’t have his eyes on her, wants to see the beach. Naturally, this trip is riddled with all sorts of accidents. Of course, these are designed to bring the unit closer.
Joseph also cannot for a second make it palpable to his family that he’s working. Whenever he can, he sneaks out his laptop to work on the presentation. The competition is with his colleague, Tyrone, to deliver the best marketing pitch. The better one gets to keep the job for the company is drastically downsizing.
Meanwhile, his ex-wife, Dora, even being elsewhere, has her gaze firmly locked on the safety and well-being of the kids, which he cannot, despite being around, quite ensure. There are too many gaffes on the way. Nevertheless, the kids are able to enter a safe, affectionate space with Nandi. He loses his car to an accident, one of many. He puts up at a sort of commune, where he also leaves his laptop behind, which he realizes only after they have arrived at the resort.
Disaster Holiday (2024) Movie Ending Explained:
How Does Joseph’s Family Road Trip Become the Ultimate Marketing Strategy?
In between, he also makes his daughter, Zamo, drive even though she hasn’t got a license yet. Joseph wants to prove to Tyrone he is also a capable, generous, and attentive father which Tyrone flags himself as being one. Zamo, as do the other two kids, have justified grudges against their father but they also help him.
The climax is long drawn. Firstly, Joseph gets arrested by mistake. Nandi discovers he hadn’t been lying about the work being serious. She realizes he could actually lose his job and rallies the kids together to be by his side, whereas previously she was about to jet off back home with them out of wrath at Joseph. After a frantic run-in with a social media influencer traffic cop, Joseph arrives at the resort. His boss and company executive are also there. He is about to give up when his family swoops in and makes the entire chaotic episodes as a study of how far he can go as a parent. It is all a stunt, they exclaim.
That is the pitch. The executive is completely won over. They broker a deal whereby Joseph gets a work-from-home option, Tyrone stays on and the family is reconciled. In the final scene, a content and fulfilled Nandi shares with Joseph her heartfelt desire to be ready for motherhood. He is so stumped at the forthcoming tide of responsibility he faints. The film therefore ends on a comic note.
Disaster Holiday (2024) Movie Review:
There are myriad ways of dissing “Disaster Holiday.” Let’s begin with its insistent, blunt focus on good parenting, and being emotionally available for your child. It hammers its point so much the comic intention in countless scenes gets wholly bulldozed. It is content being a lazy assemblage of low-brow humor mined from accidents and blunders. To top it, Nkosi plays a combination of two expressions at the most. Either he acts befuddled and overwhelmed by his character’s duties or he puts up a front of glowing satisfaction. There’s no shading.
None of the jokes land, if we can accord them such dignity. You wonder how the makers deemed it fit to stitch an entire film around cars running into accidents, and mishaps of varying degrees when the basic impetus, specifics of exasperation and desperation are altogether missing. Neither do we get an angular view of the evolving dynamics between the second wife and the kids, who apparently can’t stand her but of course they become warmer to her by the end. There’s just heaps and heaps of contrived scenes and no emotional depth. If the latter appears in sparks, it’s mostly forced in by way of intimate moments between parent and child, that lack a history and thrust of genuine feeling. The result is a by-the-numbers, terribly stock-thin, stiffly unfunny dramedy that never earns a minute of its duration or hews the mishaps into anything remotely memorable.
