If you can get past the fart jokes, the poop jokes, the hashtag Twitter jokes and all the furious product placement (and this is just the first 10 minutes) there is, I swear, a slightly charming, old fashioned, vaudeville-inspired romp at the heart of Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip. While this kiddie pic never reaches the self-aware levels of cheeseball entertainment found in Raja Gosnell’s first Smurfs movie, The Road Chip shares a similar worship of 70s/80s Muppets, meaning what drives it is that spark to dim the lights and put on a show. It’s a slightly more noble calling than just making squibbly noises for a laugh like those irritating Satan spawn known as the Minions. The Road Chip isn’t exactly what I’d call a good film and has almost nothing going on in the visual department, but for those saddled with kids for an afternoon, you could do a lot worse.

As the title suggests, our three rambunctious talking sciuridae are traveling cross-country. In this case it’s from Los Angeles, where they live with their record producer Dave (Jason Lee), to Miami, where he’s about to launch the new album by Ashley (Bella Thorne). Our gang is determined to prevent Dave from proposing to his new girlfriend Samantha (Kimberly Williams-Paisley), a heart surgeon who absentmindedly goes everywhere with a stethoscope around her neck so the kids in the audience don’t forget she’s a positive role model. Her son Miles (Josh Green) is at first mean to the three chipmunks, but they join forces on the quest to prevent the union. Big jerk Miles, still reeling from the departure of his biological father, has convinced the Chipmunks that with a new marriage, Dave will just dump the three singing rodents back into the forest.

And who could blame him? Alvin is nothing but an anarchic pest, Simon is an annoying know-it-all and Theodore is an embarrassing, gaseous twerp. But, dammit, family is family, even when it’s a cross-species one. It’ll take time for everyone to get their feelings out in the open (about 90 minutes), but along the way there’s got to be some freewheeling hijinks.

The misadventures include singing bubblegum country tunes in a Texas roadhouse and Uptown Funk with a brass band in New Orleans’ French Quarter, both to rousing cheers from lithe dancers. The four “kids” get thrown off a plane after Alvin sneaks into first class and schmoozes up John Waters (amazing tidbit: Alvin is familiar with his early, X-rated work) and Theodore unleashes zoo animals into the cabin. This enrages a dopey air marshal (Tony Hale, who takes to the material quite well) who becomes the coyote to their road runners as they continue to travel eastward to the big finish. Other familiar faces pop up, game for a loopy cameo, but not just to “play themselves”. Hale’s increasingly frantic bad guy running up against bureaucracy, very much in the spirit of Jeffrey Jones in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, is, at times, sublime.

The dialogue is rife with pandering (“This is my jizzam!” one of the Chipettes cries out, before going off to host American Idol) but the meat of the set pieces is rooted in the classics. The Chipmunks’ zeal for chaos can draw a direct line back to the Marx Brothers; Alvin instinctually knows to wander into that first-class cabin to cause trouble. Their joy comes in making music and doing a silly dance to entertain the people, and while babyish versions of Turn Down For What and Baby Got Back (both of which make appearances) are difficult to listen to for more than 45 seconds, it’s a lot easier to roll your eyes and laugh than it is to get upset. Again, anything’s less annoying than Minions.