Film Reviews

Our Family Wedding

• Rating:
• Director: Rick Famuyiwa.
• Starring: Forest Whittaker, America Ferrera, Carlos Mencia, Lance Gross.
• Details: US / 90mins (12A).

Wasn’t this movie already made and then remade? 1967's Guess Who's Coming To Dinner challenged social mores, 2005's remake Guess Who flipped it. Our Family Wedding (pitting African-Americans against Mexican-Americans) would have been a better movie it was a drama with comedic elements, but any movie with 'wedding' in the title has to be a comedy first. Trouble is, it's not funny. Marcus (Gross) and Lucia (Ferrera, Ugly Betty) plan to marry, only Lucia hasn’t told her overbearing Mexican father Miguel (Mencia) about the upcoming nuptials, that she's dropped out of law school, that her fiancé is African-American or that he's about to take off for Laos. Nightmare. Making things worse in Marcus' father Brad (Whittaker) - a smooth-talking DJ bedding women Lucia's age - and Miguel are at loggerheads because of a previous altercation. Both sets of families struggle with the culture clash in the run up to the wedding and the mounting pressure on the bride and groom drives a wedge between them. Our Family Wedding kicks off in familiar but passable fashion and there's hope that director Rick Famuyiwa and co. won't go down the clichéd, recycled route. The exchanges between Whittaker and Angie (Regina King, who also made something of her nothing role in Jerry Maguire) boast warmth and sexiness and when they are on screen together, Our Family Wedding becomes a better film. Mencia and his on-screen wife, Diana-Maria Riva, worried that her husband sees her as a wife and a mother and not a woman, strive for the same chemistry - they can't find it but it's not for the want of trying. It's a shame the movie wasn’t about these two couples. With all this going on, Gross and Ferrera are forgotten about; told by a friend that the family's butting in on the ceremony preparations will amount to "our marriage, their wedding", this comedy could be "our story, their movie." Then they go down that route. Once the plot begins to take on water and list - Miguel struggling with Brad's all mod cons bathroom is the first warning shot across the bow - it doesn’t recover and completely succumbs to nonsense. There is a Softball game where the pitcher and the batter are on the same team (maybe I don't get the rules). Granny Lupa Ontiveros spits racist remarks in Spanish and faints at the sight of a black man in her kitchen. Before it's over there will be a goat that will neck a bottle of Viagra and embark on a horny rampage (no kidding). Characters argue for no reason other than the script demands it. Nothing problems are blown out of proportion and then easily overcome. Avoid.

Review by Gavin Burke