One Liner Review:
Not nearly as funny as it should have been, this movie features a plot that we’ve seen before, and a whole lot of generic scenes, leading to all of the usual cliches.
Brief Review:
This movie is okay, and has some occasional laughs, but for the most part it’s storylines that we’ve seen before and awkward situations that are based on half-baked ideas. We’ve got the story of a white guy trying to marry the daughter of a black man who hates white guys. Especially white Jewish guys. So we basically have a combination of the Guess Whose Coming to Dinner / Guess Who situation with Meet the Parents. But here’s the thing… the formula worked for Meet the Parent, (the first one, before they milked it for two lousy sequels,) because Robert De Niro is good at playing an intimidating tough guy (and also because Ben Affleck is so perfect as the every man.) But in You People, both of its leads are miscast. Both Jonah HiIll and Eddie Murphy are best when they are playing the crazy, loose cannon, fun characters. Look at Hill in Superbad and Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop or Coming to America. These are movies where the actors were having fun. They weren’t holding back and were just letting loose. Here, in You People, everything feels scripted and structured, and dull and strict. Murphy is playing serious and angry, which is not the kind of role we love him for. And the story is about comparing Ezra (Hill’s) family to Amira’s family, beat by beat, in how awkward they all are. So whenever we get a scene of Murphy and Hill, we then have to get a parallel scene of Amira and Hills mom, Shelley (played by Julia Louis Dreyfuss.) This is not very smart, and it certainly isn’t funny. It’s dopey humor at its finest, with Ezra constantly lying about what or who he likes, in order to impress Akbar (Murphy,) and then awkwardly trying to cover up his lies. The story is completely predictable and the humor is pretty dull.
REVIEW:
You People, the new comedy co-written by Jonah Hill and starring both Hill and Eddie Murphy, is not very funny. And that’s kind of sad, because these are A list talents in the comedic industry. Pairing them together in a film is a smart move. But the story they are working with is about a white guy dating a black girl and having to deal with her tough as nails father. We’ve seen this movie before, again and again, from the Sidney Poitier classic “Guess Whose Coming to Dinner,” to the Bernie Mac – Ashton Kutcher remake of sorts, “Guess Who.” We’ve seen plenty of movies about tough, angry, non-approving fathers with movies like Meet the Parents (which they somehow squeezed a whole trilogy out of.) So You People really doesn’t have anything going for it that we haven’t seen before, other than pairing these comedic talents together and giving them the opportunity to collect an easy paycheck.
Considering the only appeal is the cast members involved, a more unique story would have gone a long way. What if they put these two together for a comedic take on Seven, for example, with the older black man having to partner up with the younger white cop? And what if they threw aliens into the mix or something, giving us more of a Men In Black thing? But of course that would have been a much different movie, and a much more expensive one to make. The simple dating movie that we are given instead had to be incredibly cheap and pretty mindless. There is no attempt at creativity here, whatsoever, and that’s a major problem.
The movie opens with Ezra (Jonah Hill,) recording a podcast with his black friend, Mo, a girl who represents the black side of their culture talks. And apparently that’s what their podcast is about.. culture. Specifically black culture, or the relationship between black and white people. Ezra has grown up with hip hop, and been a fan of black culture his whole life. That being said, they never sit down and discuss black movies or anything like that. The closest we get is a joke that gets repeated throughout the film about how Ezra has never seen the movie, Juice, and it’s not even something on the podcast. Just a talk between him and his girlfriend. The podcast thing is a little weird, considering that Ezra has no grounds for being an expert on this, whatsoever.
After that opening podcast scene, we are with Ezra at temple, where he stands with his family, saying prayers and making jokes. We meet his mom, Shelley, (played by Julia Louis Dreyfuss,) his dad, played by David Duchovny, and his sister. And there are some funny jokes here, like when Ezra and his sister go at it with insults about how the other one looks. And soon, we are outside the temple with Ezra talking to people who have known him and his family for a while. There’s the crazy doctor who insists on taking a look at Ezra’s penis, free of charge. Turns out this doctor is an orthodonist. And speaking of penis jokes, in the next scene, we are with Ezra at work where his boss calls him, “the biggest swinging dick in the west, and Ezra responds with all sorts of awkward penis lines.Between the temple scene and this, it’s a lot of penis jokes, one after another. And it’s not very funny.
The movie doesn’t exactly get better when Amira, the black girl who Ezra will become involved with, shows up. We first meet her when she tells a guy off who has been crushing on her, as he tries to use lines to win her back, that her father told him to say. She calls him on this, and even takes a look at his phone to find the exact conversation between he and her father. And then we meet her again when she is driving around lost and ends up right outside of Ezra’s building as he is waiting for his Uber. Ezra gets in, thinking she is his driver, and it’s kind of a funny meet cute. But then he offers to show her around and help her get where she’s going, and she accepts, and that’a when the movie starts to get ridiculous. There is absolutely no way that she would ever let this stranger stay in the car with her. But she does and apparently they hit it off, because the next thing you know, they are going on date after date and then sleeping with each other.
And that leads us to Ezra meeting her father, Akbar (Murphy.) We’ve already met Akbar at this point, (we met him for the first time when Amira and her brother go out to lunch with him at a restaurant and she hides the fact that she’s dating a white guy.) But the Hill and Murphy material is what we are here for, and Ezra meets him for the first time at a Waffle House restaurant. But here’s the problem… the situation is ridiculous. Ezra has called up both of Amira’s parents and invited them out without telling her. Now, to be fair, it’s because he wants to marry her, and is asking for her father’s permission. And that’s not the kind of thing that he would tell Amira about. But considering he has never met her parents before, you would think that would be the first step, before proposing or thinking about getting married. And the problem is that Ezra doesn’t even know if Amira has ever told her parents about him. They never have the conversation where he asks her if she has told her parents she is dating a white guy? Really? So, yes, his asking the parents out and actually meeting them for the first time without her being there, is not cool at all, and also completely unrealistic.
That scene at the restaurant goes pretty terribly. Ezra says all the wrong things, including calling Malcolm X “our guy,” and talking about him and Amira having sex, saying she knows her way around in the bedroom. It’s a disaster. And it ends with Ezra saying he wants to marry Amira and Akbar responding with, “you can try.” The movie does give us the scene where Ezra explains how this went to Amira afterwards, and why he did it this way. He takes out a ring to propose to her, and that smooths over the debacle of his lunch date with her parents. And now it’s onto our next parents scene, where both his parents and her parents are invited to meet each other. This meeting takes place at Amira’s parents’ house, and the conversation continues to be just as stupid and just as awkward.
Akbar talks about how important Farakan is to him, and how Farakan gave him the “crown,” he is wearing, and Ezra talks about how much he loves Farakan. Both Shelley and Akbar call him out on this, asking what Ezra loves about Farakan, and Ezra lies his way through it, saying things like “the way he calls it like it is, no frills or anything.” This is stupid stuff. So is the moment when Shelley causes Akbar’s koofie (the crown,) to catch fire. It’s one of those obvious moments, like in Meet the Parents, when they make a big deal about the ashes in the urn on the fireplace, and then you just know that something now has to happen to it. Here, the crown on first bit is just one physical example of Shelley unintentionally destroying things. Another one comes later on, at Amira’s bachelorette party, when Shelley accidentally pulls off a girls wig.
Before we get to the bachelor and bachelorette parties though, our character decide to start spending time with each other’s parents. So Ezra intentionally starts hanging out with Akbar. Why? So this movie can give us more scenes with only Hill and Murphy together. That is the absolute only reason why. We get the two of them going to the barber shop together, the two of them going to the basketball court together (this scene is actually pretty funny, in the way that Ezra turns the tables on the situation, while Akbar is filming the whole thing on his phone,) and the two of them riding in a car, awkwardly discussing a song together. And for some reason this movie thinks everything between Ezra and Akbar needs to be paralleled between Amira and Shelley. So that car listening to a song together scene comes up in Shelley’s car as well, with Shelley singing along, loudly and out of tune, and boy is it dumb.
Ezra’s bachelor party scene with “the coke guy,” happens to be the funniest scene in the movie. But unfortunately, it’s also one of the only funny scenes in the movie. And of course, we know exactly where this movie is going in terms of plot. Every romantic comedy of any kind follows the same formula for some reason. Characters get together, stay together, and then in the final act have a fight or breakup situation, only to reunite by the end. When movies go against the cliche of this plot, like The Breakup or My Best Friend’s Wedding, it’s seen as an achievement because they avoided the trap that it is so easy to get sucked into. You People does not avoid the trap. In fact, there really isn’t anything fresh or original or creative about this one. The stars are fun to watch, but they could have used a much better story to bring this level of talent together. Murphy being reduced to the angry dad is a waste of his comedic talent. The movie isn’t terrible, simply because it’s nice to watch these actors together, but it is certainly not very creative or funny.