Review of Bringing Down the House (2003) by Rick B — 11 May 2013

I wasn't expecting anything great when I sat down to watch Bringing Down the House. But wow. This movie just SUCKED on so many levels. Number one, and most importantly, where the movie fails is in being unfunny.

Painfully unfunny. Every few minutes, swear to God, there's a black joke. "Haha! Those blacks sure are wacky with their crazy lingo and their sassy attitudes!" It made me want to vomit. It feels crassly outdated and unbearably forced.

Not to mention the gawd-awful slapstick that rears its ugly head more than a few times. It's just a bunch of shitty fight choreography that makes sense only in the most surreal of cartoon worlds. Number two reason why this movie fails: the plot is cliched beyond words.

I was literally calling out lines before they happened. Amateur screenwriters that I go to school with would look at this screenplay and laugh at how childish the plotting is. The film is never really about anything.

It's not about racism; the film seems to wholly endorse it, both in the way that ALL blacks are portrayed as lowlifes and ALL whites are portrayed as stuck up racists. But it's funny, so it's ok, right? (Ok, I did laugh pretty hard when the old woman started singing, "Mama, is masa gonna sell us today? You got one laugh out of me, movie.

One.)And that score? Holy hell. Who the hell wrote this score? Apparently the same guy who wrote the Mission:Impossible theme. It's cloying, obnoxious, and only makes the movie suffer even further.

It's such a shame and a disappointment, mostly because I like the actors. Queen Latifa shouldn't have accepted such a backwards, degrading character to play, and Steve Martin seems like he's just phoning it in.

Every character is hollow and uninteresting, though they try a little harder with Latifa's character. Betty White is wasted. Eugene Levy should be embarrassed. The cast chemistry was there, and maybe if the film had narrowed its focus, taken out the racism, and just focused on the only interesting thing about the movie (which was, in my opinion, the prospect of meeting someone you didn't expect who you met on an online chat room), maybe it could have worked.

But as it stands, it's just an abysmal effort, and I'm sorry I wasted nearly two hours of my life watching it.