Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son Dir. John Whitesell

[20th Century Fox; 2011]

Styles: comedy
Others: Mrs. Doubtfire

I’ve never really understood the conceit of the Big Momma character. So the muscly gangsters and shifty-eyed drug dealers might try to rough her up thinking she’s just a fat, elderly woman, but they’ll be shaking in their boots to learn that, lo and behold, Big Momma is in fact the alter ego of… shrimpy little Martin Lawrence? Anyway, the former stand-up comedian who became a household name on the 1990s sitcom Martin — in which he also appeared in drag — dons the enormous fat suit and inexplicable blonde wig one more (I don’t want to say last) time for this utterly necessary threequel: Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son.

My first criticism of the film falls on the title: obviously a play on those of the original film and first sequel, it retains their first nine letters, removing the apostrophe in order to suggest a multiplicity of Big Mommas, as this time around, Trent (Brandon T. Jackson) — FBI agent Malcolm Turner (Lawrence)’s son — must don the wig and dress after becoming entangled in his father’s latest operation. But it lies in the tradition of all great terrible movie titles in that, if one ignores the subtitle, hasn’t seen the poster, or heard the premise, it actually just looks like a typo. The illuminating premise is simple: 17-year-old Trent — who is played by an actor obviously nearing 30 — decides to defer his admission to Duke University and pursue a career as a rapper; his father objects, refusing to sign off on a development deal, inspiring the boy/man to hunt him down and urge him to reconsider while he’s on a stakeout. But when Trent witnesses the murder of a snitch, you can probably figure out the rest.

The choice to paternalize Malcolm by squeezing him into the suit of another (less intrinsically racist but nonetheless bland) stock character, the “obsessive middle class parent pathologically fretting over his or her upwardly mobile but otherwise apathetic post-adolescent’s admission to a good college,” was well-considered as it (circuitously) allows for the film’s inciting incident. But that’s the nicest thing I can say about it. Screenwriters Matthew Fogel and Don Rhymer initiate their film with an intense chase sequence: Malcolm is in hot pursuit of a mail truck; as it turns out, it’s only college decision day and he was just really eager to get his mail. (Gotcha!) On the subject of choices: that of depicting Trent as a G-rated pop-rapper who spouts lines like “I’m a lyrical miracle” may strike some as inauthentic, but if the filmmakers had attempted even a superficial investigation of either hip-hop or youth culture, they would have discovered that there’s already a rapper called Prodigy and that college kids don’t “IM” each other anymore. As touched upon earlier, Jackson is quite visibly about 10 years older than the character he’s portraying, which is extremely distracting at times, especially during an early scene where he and his father bicker over the prospect of him blowing off college to try to make it as a pop star. The viewer can’t help but feel that Malcolm is being unreasonable, that he should let his 25-year-old son pursue that dream, as it may already be too late for him.

The film is light on jokes, especially those from this century, including, as it does, such chestnuts as “we were so poor that we used to go down to Kentucky Fried Chicken and lick other people’s fingers” (replete with an elaborate exegesis for the benefit of a bewildered college dean) and “she’s so skinny she could dodge raindrops,” both of which can be found in the Snaps books or, for that matter, on virtually any schoolyard in the 70s. For this reason, most of the film’s humor must, yet again, derive from the no-longer-amusing premise of a man, actually, now two men, dressed as women and pretending that this entirely cosmetic transformation has had some intense hormonal effect upon them. Then the rest of it, from the even fresher device of having a randy 17-year-old 25-year-old in drag furtively infiltrating otherwise closed-off feminine spaces for the express purpose of scheming on pretty girls. Added into the bargain is a particularly idiotic music sequence featuring a rap-ified rendition of Chaka Kahn’s “Ain’t Nobody” — probably not an intentional reference to LL Cool J’s cover — in which the actress Jessica Lucas amazingly manages to add phase vocoder processing to her voice without the aid of a microphone or computer. But for your $13, there are plenty of inexplicably freaky “white chick” characters and jokes from Mrs. Doubtfire that were never funny to begin with.

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