I'm not going to paste a link to the trailer in with this review. I don't want to promote it. In a perfect world Al Sharpton would be out in front of a theater right now demanding that Hollywood stop foisting crap like this on black moviegoers.
This film is a cookie-cutter "modern romance" film targeted to black couples and designed to get them into theater seats. It's actually an adaptation of a David Mamet play (or depending on how you look at it, a remake of the 1986 adaption), but had I not known that I wouldn't have guessed that this had any connection to anything resembling real art. It comes off like another contrived, cynical, and vapid "black comedy" and suffers from the same syndromes that have been affecting a large proportion of these films over the last 15 years or so.
My biggest beef with many of these films (I see this a lot, starting with "The Best Man" back in 1999, which I really hated) is this : It presents its young black characters as successful in life to varying degrees, working white-collar jobs and having plenty of disposable income, but they barely work at their jobs as far as we see in the film, and don't take those jobs seriously. In this film, one guy quits his job and upends his desk in a fit of immaturity because he can't loan credit to a friend. (After which he loans his savings to the friend's business). Both male characters are seen coming in to work late and/or hung over. It's made clear through various dialogue that they are much more concerned with their sex lives than with their jobs; at one point a call to a client is terminated so that they can discuss how each made out the night before. The female characters, while not as nonchalant about their jobs, smoke pot casually and don't appear to be having much stress in their lives except for their sexual/romantic involvements.
I don't get it. I don't see why there is an appetite for images of black people doing well, but not having to work or live responsibly. Again, this has been bothering me for 15 years now; I've sat through innumerable examples. Black kids who see these films are going to get a skewed picture of what life is, and on some level assume that it's their job to graduate from college, after which they go into a world in which the most stressful thing they'll probably go through will be deciding whether to have sex with a supervisor or not. And any white people who know black people mostly through movie images are being shown images of them as entitled brats.
If I had to guess at the reason that these images have become so exaggerated in these movies, I'd say that it's largely just laziness - imitation of other movies. I swear, it started with "The Best Man" and it's kept going from there. It's rare in any black-targeted comedy that I see an African-American person behave in a focused manner towards their job. More often we see the trappings of wealth and privilege, but the character acts like a buffoon, or just an entitled creep. If someone were actively trying to plant harmful imagery into the minds of young black Americans, they couldn't do it much more effectively than it's being done.
My other complaints with this movie that are particular to many if not all black comedies are :
1. Ridiculous ghetto behavior presented as normal. Yeah, sometimes it's funny. But if it's not a particularly funny scene, how about behavior that seems real.
2. A focus on sexual mechanics that is abnormal. It's not a black romantic comedy until we see the inevitable scene of the women talking about the men's penises, and laughing. An "ain't it the truth, child" laugh.
3. Can we stop calling women the b-word quite so much? Do you think that it gives your film some kind of hip edge?
Anyway, the romance elements in the film weren't horrible. It was generally watchable. It helped that Joy Bryant has such a nice face. If I have to look at someone's face for the length of a mediocre movie, she's a good choice. And Regina Hall was funny in a few scenes. Kevin Hart was not at his best, and Michael Early was in the movie. On the whole, it's another piece of crap movie that we'll all forget about in a few weeks.
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