If you're looking for an intellectual comedy or even something with some actual substance to it, this is not the movie to go to. It is the type of movie you go to, to turn off your brain and just take in some escapist entertainment. It does the job decently, better than most of the other light comedies out there. But what really surprises is how relatively few stupid moments come throughout the movie. A lesser-quality movie would have gone for the easy jokes about dorky white people vs. smooth black people. A lesser flick would have had some of the characters be less perceptive and observant than they actually ended up turning out to be. Poorer-quality fare would have turned this movie into something approaching blaxploitation, where all parties involved ended up humiliated by the experience.
This didn't do any of the aforementioned. Certain characters who could have been written as dumber were actually written as credibly perceptive. Certain scenarios that could have been played out as ridiculous ended up being plausible. There was less of a black/white good vs. evil conundrum going on in this movie, and the suspense involved actually seemed worth it instead of just being suspense for suspense's sake. I don't think there was one moment in the whole film where I was rolling my eyes going, "OH COME ON," the way I was throughout the last film I was obliged to go see, this year's remake of Last Holiday.
Had the premise been more original, had the comedy been more sharply written, more intelligent, I would have been inclined to give this comedy ten stars. It really is one of the better commercial movies to be released in Hollywood over the last five years. It even manages to be better than its predecessor. However, the comedy was actually quite dull, pedestrian, uninvolved, and unintellectual, which means it earns six stars out of ten. Just barely passable, but a heck of a lot better than its contemporaries.
