Reviews & Previews - Guess Who

Posted on Wednesday, August 10, 2005 at 08:00 PM

Guess Who

By: S. Tran

Starring: Bernie Mac, Ashton Kutcher
Directed by: Kevin Rodney Sullivan
Running Time: 106 Minutes
Rated: Rated PG-13 for sex-related humor

Guess Who... Cares?

The answer is not a lot of people. Once you take away the ticket sales from the pre-teen- Ashton Kutcher-crazy girl demographic I'm guessing maybe 10 other people saw this movie when it was in the theatres. Lucky (unluckily?) for me I got to see this for free when a friend rented it. Even so I somehow felt like I paid dearly in the 106 minutes it took to get through this painfully unfunny, uninspired, unoriginal "comedy". These are 106 minutes of my life I will never get back.

Kutcher plays a moron who happens to be dating a black girl Theresa, played by Zoe Saldana. I use the word moron because Kutcher's character does not appear to have any higher level brain functions at all. The premise of the movie is that Theresa's family doesn't know he is white and when they find out her father is none too pleased. Somehow Kutcher's character can't figure out that telling black jokes to her family may not be the best idea. To top it off the writers made his character some kind of high powered financial trader. Give me a break, this idiot couldn't balance his own checkbook.

While I understand this is supposed to be a comedy you have to have characters you can empathize with in order for the comedy to work. At the basis of all comedies you are still rooting for the protagonist even if he is a bit of a loser. Here none of the characters interest you in the least. Kutcher is a moronic, geeky, spineless loser, Bernie Mac is a crude, angry, obnoxious father and the rest of the cast just blends into the wallpaper waiting to fill in the spots between the "comedic" moments between Kutcher and Mac.

Also when you make a comedy, make it funny if nothing else. If you miss this target then all the other weaknesses in the film are amplified even more. The silence in the room during the big "funny" moments was deafening. We all kept waiting for the fun to start. Instead the steady flow of tired clichs keep rolling off the assembly line. When we thought it couldn't get any worse the film dumped its final load of sap and finally we were treated to the end credits. Even here though the movie couldn't get it right as the producers ran some "hilarious" outtakes for us to watch while the credits ran.

Save yourself and skip this one altogether. I gave it one out of five stars because to me any movie that gets made gets at least one star because they were able to talk someone into giving them millions of dollars to make junk.

1 out of 5 stars.