Although everyone involved in It Runs in the Family swears up and down that it is not a Douglas family vanity project, the film with all of its sentiment and schmaltz certainly feels like one. Featuring almost the entire lineage of the surviving Douglas family except for perhaps the family pet, It Runs in the Family dips and weaves between humor, drama and sometimes uncanny references to what we know to be real-life Douglas drama. Between conjugal tongue encounters and heavy petting, Alex Gromberg (Michael Douglas) struggles to keep his marriage ring on while working with a woman whose initials are not 'CZJ'. Admittingly, the casts' blood relation does lend a personal and interesting dimension to the film, but the less-than-stellar plot and the almost excruciating slow pace of the film is indicative that the Douglas clan may have been looking for a script that better suited their needs rather than something exceptionally creative. Because with all its charm and onscreen chemistry between Kirk and Michael, It Runs in the Family still feels like a drawn-out vehicle to feature the chemistry between father and son.

This judgment begs the question: Did the semi-biopic script serendipitously find its way into the hands of Michael Douglas, whom was so impressed that he climbed aboard as producer of the project and just so happened to cast members of his own family? Hardly. The Douglas men's desire to work together led Michael to test several scripts on his dad presumably to gauge which one would best showcase their onscreen chemistry. As a result, the final cut feels as methodical as the process of bringing the film to screen. Which leads to the next important question on the road to formulating an impartial decision: Would this film be as lukewarmly creative or enjoyable if the Douglas family were not the cast? It seems that no matter who played the roles of the Gromberg family on the cusp of change, the film would have been mediocre at best. Therefore to expel the talent of Kirk and Michael on this Hallmark-like family drama seems wasteful. Even the genre of family film is ill-fit for powerhouse actors who once played Spartacus and Wall Street mogul Gordon Gekko. It's like watching titans settle down in traditional roles in their obsolescence, which is tragic in itself. Compounded with the somber mood of the film, there is enough weight to sap all the energy out of Richard Simmons.

It Runs in the Family charts the trials and tribulations of any given affluent family living in the upper crust New York City. The chariots of mortality draw nigh to the Gromberg patriarch, Mitchell (patriarch of his own family, Kirk Douglas). Although at the beginning of the film, a doctor gives him a clean bill of health along with the assurance of a "few good years," Mitchell's angst over his displacement in the modern world leads him to pierce the air with a gnarled finger and make the self-referential advice to "Never get old."

Dispelling the image of the benevolent elderly person at peace with his mortality, It Runs in the Family provides a cursory exploration of the human discomfiture with aging. Director Fred Schepisi certainly milks the empathetic sentiment of an elderly man in the throes of modern life with emotionally harrowing scenes of Mitchell being pushed down by runners in Central Park and being relegated to the sidelines during family gatherings. Mitchell and Alex are like magnets exerting equal but opposite force against each other by trying to establish their dominance and authority in the relationship.

A classic scene that crosses influence between Grumpy Old Men and A River Runs Through It has three generations of the Gromberg family, Mitchell, Alex and Asher (Cameron Douglas) fishing for dinner, but having their endeavors fail because of personality conflicts. Despite the successes in his life of being a lawyer and having a primarily nuclear family, Alex is not without his own problems. He tries to maneuver out of the shadows of his father's persuasion and out of the way of a sexually determined co-worker named Suzie (Sarita Choudhury), while really still trying to find his own identity. He is married to an unhappy psychiatrist (Bernadette Peters), who despite her successful career cannot decipher why her sons, wayward Asher and morose Eli (Rory Culkins) are so strange. Actually, five minutes into the movie, you realize that all members of the Gromberg family are not normal and actually pretty crazy; especially the nonsensically babbling uncle (Mark Hammer) from the convalescent home, but this notion of eccentricity is apparently what humanizes the movie.

Little gems are scattered through the movie that predominantly feels as gloomy as Rory Culkins looks all the time. The Viking funeral scene where Mitchell and Alex bury a deceased relative in an unorthodox manner is as touching as it is funny. It's one of the few scenes in the film where the banter does not sound contrived or overly acted, but these scenes don't save the movie from mediocrity.

The moral of the movie is referential to the tagline, "Some families can survive anything. Even each other." In his roles as a man comfortable in the habits set by years of doing the same things, Kirk Douglas does a good job of eliciting sympathy from the audience, but that may have more to do with the fact that he is old than his already established acting abilities. Is it a stretch for Michael Douglas to play a conflicted son to his own father or for Cameron Douglas to play a rebellious deejay when in real-life, that is his day job? The characters they play may be a stone's throw from who each member of the Douglas clan really is, but once recognized as a vehicle to portray their famous lineage, It Runs in the Family can be enjoyed for what it is - a glorified Hallmark movie about a family playing a family on film.