Definitely a lesser entry, and it suffers from not enough time spent on the characters we know and love, and a lot of time spent on new characters that aren't awful- they're just hard to get invested in. It must have been hard at this point for Yamada to keep coming up with genuinely new things for Tora and his family to do.

But they'd have to actively try to make a Tora-san film bad at this point in the franchise, as the experience of watching one of these movies is just so comforting, even if it's not really saying anything or doing anything new.