Guess Who
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.
© 2005 Review by Son Tran
