Dir: Adam Shankman. Starring: Steve Martin, Queen Latifah, Eugene Levy, Joan Plowright, Jean Smart, Kimberly J. Brown.
There’s nothing worse than a funny comedian slumming it. Steve Martin has given us so much, and so little over the years. For Every Dirty Rotten Scoundrels there was a Father of the Bride (or three), for every Planes and Trains, a Sgt Bilko. Bring Down The House definitely belongs in the latter category.
Stevo plays Martin Sanderson, an uptight lawyer with no time for his kids and a marriage sacrificed to get ahead in the firm. Queen Latifah (who executive produced – God knows how she predicted this film’s success) is a sassy ex-con who jive-talks her way into Martin’s life by pretending to be a lawyer, and Teaches Him To Be Cool Again. Sigh.
That’s it. Credit should go to this film for giving its cut-outs an emotional resonance; the characters actually develop, and there’s a simple plot that beats the endless fart set-ups of more recent comedies. At the same time, a few more fart jokes wouldn’t have gone astray. I smiled twice in this film, once at a fart joke and the other time… ah, you get the picture.
As for race relations, Bring Down The House could be a lot worse. In not actually being funny, it skilfully avoids any kind of extremity that would be construed as insulting. On the other hand, Latifah’s blackness really only exists for Martin to play off, and even that’s not funny. The other target of the film is rich white people, and again, Sanderson plays with such a gentle vision of being white, rich and American that it certainly rings true, but it sure as Hell doesn’t ring funny.
Bringing down the House is such an eighties throwback, watching it reminded me of a host of unfunny movies with big hair. Please, smaller hair, bigger jokes. Someone needs to teach producers how to be cool again.
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