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Familiar, but cast, director give it juice
By Roger Moore
Orlando Sentinel
Published on Friday, Feb 08, 2008
Hollywood, which spent most of the last century ignoring the black family, seems determined to spend most of this one showing the same black family. Over and over.
It's big. It's loud. It's crude. It's often — but not always — Southern. It's on the road with Ice Cube or Cedric, in the kitchen or on the couch with Maddea or Latifah, always ready for a reunion, a Christmas dinner or a barbecue.
But for all its movie conventions, all the ingredients that these ''Are the Wayans Here Yet, Tyler Perry?'' retreads share, they still can find new giggles in worn-out situations.
The secret, on grand, rude and energetic display in Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins, is filling the screen with the cream of today's black comics. Calling Roscoe — a ''TV talk-show host goes home to Georgia'' romp — a ''Martin Lawrence comedy'' sells it short. Lawrence is so surrounded by funny folk that you barely have time to remember the decade or so he spent phoning it in.
He's Roscoe, the big success returning to the family he never has time for and bringing his skinny, athletic trophy fiancee, a ruthlessly competitive Survivor winner named Bianca (Joy Bryant), with him. In L.A., he's Dr. R.J. Stevens and worthy of attention on Access Hollywood. In Dry Springs, he's just Roscoe, the kid brother to the roughhousing Otis (Michael Clarke Duncan) and the mouthy mouthful Betty (Mo'Nique), the cousin to the family favorite, Cadillac dealer Clyde (Cedric the Entertainer), and he's just a pair of deep pockets for fast-talking cousin Reggie (Mike Epps) to pick.
It's his parents' 50th wedding anniversary, and Roscoe, the huckster selling his The Team of Me book and philosophy on TV, has issues to work out with Dad (James Earl Jones), if not Mom(Margaret Avery). He has old conflicts with Clyde to relive. And there's an old flame (Nicole Ari Parker) to infuriate the hyper-competitive Bianca.
If anything, writer-director Malcolm D. Lee (The Best Man, Undercover Brother) has too many story threads and too many characters to keep straight. Roscoe's father's failings aren't explored. Roscoe's own son has issues. Bianca's competitive streak is undeveloped, and she has pushed Roscoe to videotape the reunion for a TV special (an idea abandoned, then brought back for the closing credits).
Lee sacrifices all of this and some of the movie's coherence at the altar of energy and over-the-top hilarity. It's an aggressive comedy, in-your-face with comic sex (human and canine) and broad, angry slapstick.
Lawrence, faced with watching Cedric and the rest of the cast walk off with the movie, throws himself into this in a way we haven't seen in years. He should stick to this new director like brown on rice, because Lee doesn't make it easy on him. When the star's or the movie's energy flags, Lee points the camera at Epps. Or Mo'Nique, a comic built to take out her tonnage on any skinny mini who calls her ''sweet tea'' ''liquid diabetes.''
''She 'bout to get the Cover Girl smacked right off her face.''
Lee gives the man-mountain Duncan (The Green Mile) some of the funniest lines about Bianca's diet regimen for Roscoe vs. Southern cooking.
''The black Paris Hilton done sissified you off the pig.''
These movies are universal in a lot of ways, and it's the color-blind stuff that holds Lee's comedy back. The friendly family football-softball game/sack race is so weary you wonder if anybody outside of Hollywood films still has them. Is there a reunion on Planet Earth that has a ''Family Obstacle Course'' as a yearly competition?
And for such a distinctly ''country'' and ''Southern-fried'' folk, the Jenkins clan hasn't a drawl among them.
But none of that will kill the crowd-pleasing appeal of Lee's comedy. The big laughs will cancel out the over-familiar and overly drawn out, the life lessons lost to make way for an off-color giggle. And when Roscoe becomes the hit it's almost guaranteed to be, Hollywood will write somebody a check to change the names and find a cast willing to act related and do the Welcome Home thing all over again.
Get the full article here.
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