Horror At The Multiplex, And A Clunker At The Video Store – It’s Bad News All Around

Over the last two weeks, one of the most surprising stories at the box office has been the success of the supernatural drama, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which took in over $30 million its opening weekend and handily surpassed all predictions. That’s good news for Hollywood because the success of the film has helped boost overall business for three weekends in a row, as compared to the same time last year, and gave studios hope, after a shockingly sluggish summer, that people still will make an effort to get out and go to the movies.

However, for an avowed scaredy cat like myself, the release of the latest horror flick du jour meant not a trip to the multiplex, but a stop at my local video store to check out one of the country’s top rentals, Guess Who. Unfortunately, I think I would have had more fun playing Guess Who? (the old Milton Bradley board game) with a bratty, spoiled six-year-old than I did watching this underwhelming, misconceived comedy.

Guess Who, starring Bernie Mac and Aston Kutcher, is a comedic remake of the 1967 drama, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (the final, big-screen teaming of the legendary pair of Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn), which examined the topic of interracial dating.  But whereas the original film featured a wealthy white couple facing their daughter’s new, African-American fiancé, this new spin features Mac as Percy Jones, a wealthy black banker whose oldest daughter, Theresa (Zoe Saldana), is arriving for his 25-year wedding anniversary celebration, brings home her new beau, Simon Green (Kutcher), who happens to be white.

Percy, already an imposing and imperious figure to his daughter’s previous boyfriends, is especially hard on Simon, who strives in vain to impress his future father-in-law.  Matters get worse when Simon fails to tell Theresa about an important development at work and then proceeds to tell her father a little fib to try to gain his favor.  As you might expect, things snowball from there.

Directed by Kevin Rodney Sullivan, who gave us Barbershop 2 (not exactly an instant classic), this film, when simply taken on its own merits, is an inconsistent mess that can’t seem to decide whether it wants to explore and explode racial stereotypes (Percy is a big fan of NASCAR… but the joke ends there) or if it’s simply satisfied being a lazy retread of tired tropes (there’s an atrocious scene in which a gaggle of black women get together and gripe about their men). But it’s fair to say that the comedy fails to mine as many laughs as recent, similarly-themed but better quality comedies as Meet the Parents and Father of the Bride, the latter of which was a remake of a Spencer Tracy flick.

Speaking of Spencer Tracy, Mac, though affable and full of fun comedic energy, is no Tracy, and his teaming with Kutcher, who is serviceable here, comes nowhere near the wattage of Tracy and Hepburn in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. In fact, although the ’67 film is dated in many ways, it is still much more relevant, poignant, funny and flat-out entertaining than this new, falsely hip version.

In fact, two particular scenes from the original film, one featuring Hepburn’s firing of a prejudiced co-worker, and the other Tracy’s sterling, captivating concluding monologue (one off-screen note: Tracy died less than a month after completing the filming of this picture), are more worth the price of admission than the whole of this newer film. If you want to be entertained by Mac, try renting episodes of his TV series, now available on DVD, or take a peek at Ocean’s Eleven, in which he is part of a slick ensemble cast.  But if you have to rent a Guess Who flick, definitely go with the original over this trite, uninspired remake.

Guess Who is rated PG-13 for language and sex-related humor.