Review: Our Family Wedding

Posted by: Elizabeth Hughes Belzil  •  March 13, 2010 @ 3:46am

Filed under: Reviews

Somewhere around mid-February a wire in my brain fried, temporarily disabling my recognition of subtleties, the nuances of bad and good -- the mechanism commonly known as taste. Eventually the coils will mend and the neurons will resume firing but for the moment I am imprisoned in a world of absolutes. Our Family Wedding is bad, unconditionally, irrefutably bad. I know that much. How bad exactly I couldn't tell you. Is it worse than The Wolfman? Maybe. Is it better than When in Rome? Perhaps. Even if it is the superlative of the three that's like saying it's in the top 30% of the bottom 10%. In some ways, distinguishing exactly why and to what degree this film is bad seems like a waste of time.

Our Family Wedding is the story of two young people, one black, one Hispanic, whose fathers (played by Forest Whitaker and Carlos Mencia) clash at every turn while planning their wedding. Perhaps part of my dislike of this film arises from an aversion to the genre: in my books, raced based comedy ranks one step above prop comedy. (That isn't a compliment.) I'm still deciding as to whether or not I think the film is racist. Maybe slightly, mainly towards Hispanics, but not offensively so. Though the bar for "acceptable racism" has been lowered since I watched The Blind Side last Sunday. Overall, the film isn't a tragic in any way, except maybe for Forest Whitaker--oh wait I'd forgotten he was in Battlefield Earth. If food fights, goat rape scenes and Mexican jokes sound like your idea of a funny movie-- have at it.

Tags: Forest Whitaker, Carlos Mencia, America Ferrera, Regina King, Lance Gross, Charlie Murphy

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