Ashton Kutcher, Bernie Mac, Zoë Saldaña, Judith Scott
Ashton Kutcher does one thing well: flailing. When it comes to flapping his skinny arms and legs like a stork suffering a panic attack and contorting his face into an embarrassed grimace, this young actor has few equals. Mac also boasts a specialty: fuming. Flailing and fuming frenetically, these two performers combine their modest talents to try to breathe life into a loose reworking of 1967's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. The races are reversed in Guess Who: a black woman (Saldaña) brings her white fiancé (Kutcher) home to a New Jersey suburb, and her dad (Mac) is none too pleased.
While certainly no work of comic genius (then again, neither was the original Guess, which is best remembered as the final onscreen pairing of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy), Guess Who is one of those rare movies that gets markedly better halfway through. It jerks to life when Simon (Kutcher), after prodding from the itching-for-a-fight father, starts telling jokes about blacks during a family meal. His first few mild examples ("What do you call a hundred white men chasing after one black man? The P.G.A. Get it? Tiger Woods") crack up everyone and, emboldened, Simon ventures into offensive, racist territory. Real nerves are touched, both onscreen and with viewers. What had been a dopey, slapsticky movie suddenly takes on a hint of substance as the characters discuss what it means to traffic in such humor and where lines are crossed.
What follows never quite matches that scene, but Guess Who, as directed by Kevin Rodney Sullivan (Barbershop 2), at least becomes more than just a copy of Meet the Parents with an interracial overlay. Of the cast, Saldaña and Scott, who portrays her mother, give graceful, multifaceted performances that only serve to underscore the one-notedness of both Kutcher and Mac's schtick. (PG-13)
COMEDY
Sandra Bullock, Regina King, Treat Williams, Ernie Hudson, Diedrich Bader, Enrique Murciano, William Shatner
How can you be mean about a movie in which the FBI agent heroine confides, "I don't like to use my gun unless it's in self-defense or a really good sale at Bergdorf's"? Now there's a sentiment every bargain-minded woman—is there any other kind?—can get behind.
Bullock returns as Gracie Hart, the ugly duckling FBI agent who morphed into a swan to go undercover at a beauty pageant in 2000's Miss Congeniality. In a genial but none too believable sequel (not that the first film played like a documentary), Gracie undergoes another makeover, this time to become a sleek, designer-clad mouthpiece for the FBI. Obsessing over fashion and blithely mistreating the little people, she snaps out of her ditzy daze only when a beauty queen pal (Heather Burns) is kidnapped along with the pageant's host (Shatner) in Las Vegas. Then Gracie and her pugnacious sidekick (King) swing into action.
This sequel doesn't have much in the way of plot or characterization going for it, but it does have Bullock and King, two of the most likable actors around, front and center. That goes a long way toward making this flimsy bit of fluff tolerable and, yes, even fun. (PG-13)
Brennan plays Shatner's mom in Congeniality 2, but in real life she's four years younger. What, no nonagenarians auditioned?
The Ballad of Jack and Rose
Writer-director Rebecca Miller (Personal Velocity) stumbles slightly with an ambitious, overstuffed drama about the last stubborn inhabitant of a Utopian commune (Daniel Day-Lewis, who is wed to Miller in real life) and his teenage daughter (Camilla Belle). Catherine Keener costars and, like Day-Lewis and Belle, gives a lovely performance. (R)
D.E.B.S.
In a feather-weight spoof of Charlie's Angels, a pulchritudinous covert crime fighter (Sara Foster) falls for the world's leading female criminal (Jordana Brewster), and vice versa. Director-writer Angela Robinson (who directed Lindsay Lohan's next movie, Herbie: Fully Loaded) lets style triumph over substance here. (PG-13)
Off the Map
A man (Sam Elliott) sits in the dark, tears dampening his face. His loving wife (Joan Allen) and precocious 11-year-old daughter (Valentina de Angelis) try to cope with and cure his depression even as they struggle to eke out a subsistence living in rural New Mexico. Director Campbell Scott (Big Night) is more interested in the journey than the destination here, but it's a scenic, beautifully acted trip. (PG-13)
- Contributors:
- Leah Rozen.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
