You People (2023 - Netflix) Don't care how many people thought this was funny......
It's a rotting, steaming turd of a movie, served up to wring laughs out of every deep, wounding division in our current culture.
Supposedly, it takes its inspiration from the long ago 1967 "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner"....whose very title became an immediate catchphrase for interracial romance and marriage.
In reality, "You People" functions as an unholy, toxic mash-up of both that film and "Meet The Parents".....presenting an odd couple mis-match of a white Jewish man (Jonah Hill) and a Muslim Black Girl (Lauren London) deeply in love, but faced with their parents very differing reactions.....
Hill's mother (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) unleashes an overcompensating torrent of ultra-liberal woke condescension, a dumb, offensive horror show that leaves Hill and London aghast and embarrassed.
Dreyfus applies the full force of her comedic chops to this thankless, miserable role, but her character, as written and performed, is so obliviously stupid, she maintains her insulting idiocy almost throughout the entire film.
While Hill groans and moans at his mother's antics, he's no less clueless in his desperate attempts to court favor with London's disapproving, unforgiving father (Eddie Murphy). But Murphy's withering stares at Hill tell you he ain't buyin' it. The very sight of Hill romancing his daughter triggers not only his anger and distrust of whites, but of Jewish whites, as preached to him by one of his idols, the rabidly Anti-Semitic Reverend Louis Farrakan...
What follows is a succession of increasingly aggravating encounters between the exasperated Hill and London and their two sets of parents (including David Duchovny as Hill's father and Nina Long as London's mother, both of them reduced to mostly to eye-rolling reactive expressions as Dreyfus and Murphy carry on....)
I can't fault the performances of everyone here.....their timing, especially Murphy's is devastating in making you constantly cringe in agony at every humiliating moment.
But I didn't find any of it funny for a single minute. Everything this appalling film throws into the mix to squeeze out laughs, the deep racial division, the long simmering antisemitism, all of it backfires and leaves a sour, foul cloud hanging the whole enterprise.
And even worse, after all the poison it spills, the film lurches into an unbelievable, unearned happy ending.......with all the parents seeing the light and blessing the union of their children....
Yeah, right. Sure thing. Whatever.
BQ says avoid this movie.....it's a landfill of stench, cruelly extracted from all of the noxious attitudes and behaviors that have filled today's cultural discourse with hatred, distrust and lies. Zero stars (0). Flush it.
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