Guess Who

Guess Who (Director: Kevin Rodney Sullivan)

Sullivan's previous films include Barbershop 2 and How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Now, now, fellas, don't confuse this with something that sounds like a biopic on a sixties/seventies rock band, it's just a shortened title for the remake of 1967's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.

I think most taboos have been covered nowadays, and while the film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner must have been controversial back in the day, what with white women bringing black fiances home to meet the parents, that sort of thing isn't any kind of groundbreaking issue in America today. Of course, I'm not saying that this subject doesn't make some (or many) people uncomfortable, but within a film--a medium which generally begs the viewer to watch because you are about to see something interesting or a story in which you've never heard, the idea of interracial romance isn't exactly unsettling anymore.

Here, we have racial reversal, and it's a black woman, Theresa (Zoe Saldana), who is bringing home a white man, Simon (Ashton Kutcher), to meet her parents (Bernie Mac and Judith Scott). Which means, taking away the racial angle, it's already got the story of the recent Meet the Parents and Meet the Fockers. The conflict really is the fact that Simon seems to lie to try to make Theresa's father like him, and the distrust becomes fodder for the "real love story" with Kutcher and Mac. Another problem is that Simon has just quit his job as a hotshot stock broker, and in the painful, cliche setup is going to tell Theresa about it until she interrupts and says, "My dad's so glad you have a job!"

And then, like many romantic comedies, the film then becomes a series of episodes: Simon tells racially-insensitive jokes at the dinner table with Percy's (Mac) urging, which is OK with everyone until it goes too far, a racing of go-carts, a dance lesson, and so on. People learn things about love, guys are assholes, women are angels no matter what, and everything is OK if we just accept it.

Kutcher is a lot better in this than the trailer makes him out to be, and Bernie Mac is his usual good self. The story is about them, so the women in the movie are generally expendable--which means all the fuss that is made over the leads' getting their women back in the end is kind of pointless. Although the characters know why the women "make them whole," we don't. In fact, there's almost nothing believable about Kutcher and Saldana being lovers, or that they'd need each other.

What can I say about this? It's better than December's Meet the Fockers. Bernie Mac's father character, while distrustful and goes to great lengths to figure out why Simon bugs him so much, doesn't go over into the dark side, Star Wars-style, like De Niro does. It's your usual, everyday, who-asked-for-it, flick that will make somewhere around 20-25 million over the weekend then die quickly.