Billy Crystal and Bette Midler are gifted comedians, but neither is likable or has a particularly ingratiating manner, Crystal being caustic and contemptuous, Midler aggressive and in your face. This family comedy casts them as Artie and Diane, a middle-class couple living in northern California where Artie is the wise-cracking commentator for a minor baseball club that's just fired him as part of a rebranding exercise. Both are happily complacent in their old-fashioned ways.

Their only daughter, Alice (Marisa Tomei), is a successful businesswoman living with her husband, Phil, a cutting-edge inventor of electronic systems (Tom Everett Scott), and three pre-teen children in Atlanta. Desperate to have someone mind the kids for a week, Alice and Phil invite the parents down to Georgia, where the ever-bickering Artie and Diane attempt to impose tough love and traditional ideas about diet, education, leisure pursuits and discipline on cosseted modern kids raised in a liberal style that makes Dr Spock look like Dr Arnold.

Parental Guidance is a brutal comedy of bad manners in which the grandparents from hell descend on the daughter and son-in-law from purgatory to dispute whose right it is to impose their values on a new generation emerging from the corner of the map bearing the sign "Here Be Dragons".