Forest Whitaker is an Oscar winner, an actor who has given nuance and power to portrayals of Charlie Parker and Idi Amin. In "Our Family Wedding," he gets accosted by a goat that has eaten Viagra.
That's pretty sad, but that may not be the worse thing about "Wedding." It also wastes the talents of Regina King ("Ray," and TV's "Southland"), and "Ugly Betty's" America Ferrera.
It's another of those films trading on the theme of "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," but it applies none of the grace and thoughtfulness.
Lance Gross ("Tyler Perry's House of Pain") as Marcus, a budding doctor, and Ferrara as Lucia, an aspiring lawyer, play a New York couple in love who want to get married. But Lucia hasn't told her parents that she's been living with a man, she's not a virgin anymore and she has dropped out of law school to teach.
And Lance is black.
Apparently, that's too much for her protective father (comedian Carlos Mencia) to handle. Meanwhile, Marcus' father (Whitaker) is a radio jock, persnickety, single and bitter toward marriage, who has recently had a run-in with a Mexican-American tow truck operator. Guess who that tow truck operator is?
We expect a certain amount of predictability in romantic comedies, and while that's lazy, it doesn't sting as much as the fact that the film casually trades in racial stereotypes and slurs for laughs. I'm sooo tired of that.
And then, after setting up this Grand Canyon-size cultural chasm between these families, the movie upends that premise with the simplistic "love is all that matters."
And we get the cross-cut scenes of both sides trying on the other's "culture," in this case reducing hundreds of years of history to the Mariachi and the Electric Slide. Ugh.
Although Gross and Ferrera are the pretty young couple here, Gross' character is bland, so there's not much fire. Instead, King and Whitaker create the sparks; King is typically intelligent, warm and sexy; Whitaker, soulful, and surprisingly romantic.
He even manages to preserve some dignity during the goat scene.
