Tired, simplistic 'Cookout' leaves a sour taste
This Labor Day weekend, if you're someone who plans to head from your cookout to the one that just opened at your local megaplex, you might be wondering when it's OK to stop worrying about the tired shenanigans in "The Cookout" and roll around the aisles with everybody else.
Maybe it's the moment that Todd Anderson (Storm P), who's signed with the New Jersey Nets for $30 million, pulls into a gated community of McMansions and the little white girls start shrieking from their lawns. (Todd and his family are black -- or as loony neighbor Farrah Fawcett calls them, "Negroes.") The time to kick back and relax could be the moment that Danny Glover, playing Fawcett's uptight, self-hating husband, sneaks away to get high in a garage with two obese twins. Or later when he strolls out in a sweatsuit and fake cornrows.
Hold up! Danny Glover gets high? In this inept circus? Danny Glover, star of "Mandela" and "Operation Dumbo Drop," and elder statesman of all things dignified? Well, if he can roll with the dim-witted sloppiness around him, can't we all? "The Cookout" makes it really hard, however. While it claims to be about great American values such as family and love, it's been made with nary a lick of TLC.
The movie's m.o. is to dispel racial assumptions by reinforcing them. On the eve of signing with the Nets, Anderson, a Rutgers grad, takes questions from an insulting journalist, played by the always brilliantly insulting Wendy Williams, who wants to hear about his abusive family and ghetto childhood. But he grew up in stable, middle-class house with a supportive mother and father (Jenifer Lewis, who's typically fierce, and Frankie Faison). But naturally, when Todd moves to his opulent subdivision, the movie give us a few bars from "The Jeffersons" theme song and gives Todd the ghetto life he never had.
He agrees to have the family cookout at his new place. Soon, chez Todd is overrun with estranged folks crawling from the woodwork. There is a pair of country cousins and a fertile cousin with at least three babies, all from different fathers, who've come looking for NBA cash. Also on his way is Ja Rule, as a gun-toting bully who intends to force Todd to autograph a bunch of sneakers he wants to sell for thousands on
As if that weren't enough, Queen Latifah, one of the movie's producers, is on hand to stooge it up and make funny faces as a security guard. Most of the women have awful hair and a tough carriage that make them look like drag queens, and at the last minute Eve shows up wearing what must be one of Chaka Khan's old weaves.
"The Cookout" is one of those movies that sometimes seems as if it were shot to preemptively replicate the experience of making do with a bootleg version. It seems out to uphold the African-American worry that black people "can't have nothin' nice" without somebody trying to tear it up. While the film's upscale neighborhood looks dingier than it probably should, the characters, who show up by the UPN-load, seem determined to deface whatever class the movie might have had. Among the riff-raff, there are some people who are good for something, like Todd's skeezy cousin. She can turn "flashlight" into a four-syllable word.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
The Cookout
Directed by: Lance Rivera
Written by: Ramsey Gbelawoe, Jeffrey Brian Holmes, Laurie Turner
Starring: Storm P, Jenifer Lewis, Frankie Faison, Ja Rule, Meagan Good, Farrah Fawcett, Queen Latifah, Tim
Meadows, Eve, Jonathan Silverman, Danny Glover
At: Boston Common, Fenway, and suburbs
Running time: 85 minutes
Rated: PG-13 (drug content, sexual references, language)
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