[Editor's Note: Our Family Wedding opens Fri., March 12 at area theaters. (You can check showtimes here.) For more reviews of the biggest new releases, check out the Daily Loaf Movie Review Index.]
"It's your marriage; it's their wedding."
Our Family Wedding repeats this mantra over and over and over again, the phrase treated as if it is somehow idiomatic. But "idiotic" would be a more accurate description it, and for Rick Famuyiwa's (The Wood) fourth outing as a director, as this film manages to fail in so many ways that it's hard to keep track of them all.
First and foremost, Our Family Wedding is supposed to be a comedy. If we are to judge a comedy by whether it delivers laughs, this movie is a disaster. The most we get is a couple of smirks or smiles sparsely distributed among 101 minutes of awkward and boring. Only the comic timing and delivery of Taye Diggs (whose character is reminiscent of his work in Malibu's Most Wanted) and relative newcomer Anjelah Johnson manage to elicit a smile. Famuyiwa doesn't know what he wants his movie to be, blending slapstick with romantic comedy, French farce with an edgy politically incorrect examination of race relations — which is kind of like trying to mix the musical styles of John Coltrane, Bizmarkey and "Weird" Al Yankovic.
This article appears in Mar 10-16, 2010.