Starring: Steve Martin, Queen Latifah
Director: Adam Shankman
Rated: PG
EDITORS who put trailers together have a tough time getting the balance right.
Whether it’s comedy or drama, they want to give us enough information to entice us to see the film, but not so much that we think we have seen the best of what’s on offer.
Unfortunately, the trailer for Bringing Down the House gives us its best.
Charlene Morton (Queen Latifah) is in prison. She claims to be innocent of the crime so spends her time researching the law for an appeal. On the Internet she enters a legal chat room and meets divorced and lonely tax lawyer Peter Sanderson (Steve Martin).
He thinks Charlene is a criminal lawyer. Romance blossoms. When Peter sets up a date, Charlene breaks out of prison to keep it. Peter is shocked to find that his cyber friend is a sassy black woman on the run from the law. Charlene moves in and turns Peter’s world upside down.
Bringing Down the House is a delightfully thin film trading on a clash of racial stereotypes. It gets away with it because the African Americans in the film are sending themselves up. So much so, not knowing the hip black lingo of the urban rap scene places non-US audiences at a disadvantage. I found some of the dialogue unintelligible. But, what does it matter? This is not rocket science.
Queen Latifah of Chicago fame, who seems to specialise in playing characters named Morton who live or work in prison, is a larger than life presence in all her scenes.
Steve Martin does an acceptable workaday job. It is English veteran Joan Plowright, however, who steals the show as Mrs Arness, a conservative heiress whose tax business Sanderson is courting. Her ‘negro spiritual’ scene is a riot.
Bringing Down the House could have been better if it cut out some of the silly sight gags and toned down the overdrawn characterisations, but if you want a film that makes no demands on you and gives you a few smiles, see the trailer and then catch the film.
