Death at a Funeral

Movie Grade: D

Rounding up a veritable “who’s who” of today’s African-American comedic personalities, handing them an over-the-top script and letting the magic happen should be a fool proof recipe for laughs… right? Comedian Chris Rock certainly thought so, when he endeavored to remake the 2007 British comedy Death at a Funeral into a Los Angeles-set take with virtually the same script, but with a mostly-black cast.

The results are an unpleasant surprise for everyone. Not only is Death at a Funeral patently unfunny despite many seemingly desperate attempts at various flavors of humor, but it actually makes some members of its all-star cast — including Martin Lawrence, Danny Glover and Rock himself — appear shockingly unlikable.

The film seems comprised of a mess of subplots, but it centers roughly around the harried Aaron (Chris Rock) as he prepares for his father’s at-home funeral. We quickly learn that Aaron comes from a large and roundly self-centered family, including a cheapskate absentee brother (Martin Lawrence), a dramatically grief-stricken mother (Loretta Devine), and a wife (Regina Hall) who can think of literally nothing but bugging Aaron about her audibly ticking biological clock. These characters are so intensely self-involved that they are barely shadows of realistic people which makes almost all of them quickly repellent, and shades the film in a confusing light. (Is it supposed to be slapstick? Gross-out? Warm, relatable ensemble flick a la Love Actually? It’s never quite clear, but it’s disappointing in any event.)

Also in attendance at the funeral are Aaron’s cousin Elaine (Zoe Saldana) and her fiance Oscar (a cringeworth James Marsden), who has accidentally ingested a hallucinogenic and spends the majority of the film making silly facesm, running around naked and uttering jibberish. These scenes are particularly difficult to stomach; there’s only so many miles you can travel on the steam of an “Uh-oh, the crazy white guy is high” joke before the laughs are obligatory, but Death at a Funeral pushes this inane concept the length of the movie.

As the family gathers, hijinks ensue. But when one of the guests, Frank (a role reprised here by Peter Dinklage), tries to blackmail Aaron with photos of himself and Aaron’s father in some untold gay sex act, things totally implode.

The characters’ disgusted reactions to this bit of news is one of the more disturbing elements that were lost in translation between films. Where the original film played this revelation up as surprising and potentially hurtful to the main character’s mother, this version makes the idea of two men having sex seem positively vomitous. (Not just once, but repeatedly as more and more characters are let in on the secret.) It’s almost enough to make one examine the cultural double standard at play. Almost, but not quite. There’s plenty more to dislike in the next scene, a real nasty one which depicts Glover‘s

feces flying into Tracy Morgan‘s mouth. You know, real subtle humor.

That aside, the only laughable moments belong to Morgan, and even those seem adlibbed and separate from the wooden script. Rock‘s performance would have been more at home in a freshman film student’s short that it is here, and Lawrence spends far too much time ogling some underage girl’s behind to actually do anything particularly useful. I’m thoroughly convinced, given the universally unfunny performances, that these shortcomings are simply the result of bad written dialogue. These people are professionally hilarious. The first thing director Neil LeBute should have done is let them do what they do best.

Death and a Funeral offers nothing in the way of real laughs, and is bogged down by the clumsy zanniness of its blog, and the cultural insensitivity of the characters. With this, the best moments are all in the trailer, and the rest is crap. Sometimes even literally.

Movie Grade: D

Synopsis:

A funeral ceremony turns into a debacle of exposed family secrets and misplaced bodies