Our Family Wedding

Rick Fumuyiwa

BY Robert BellPublished Mar 11, 2010

Early in Our Family Wedding, Carlos Mencia excuses himself to use Forest Whitaker's bathroom, which has an elaborate, voice-activated sink. Not understanding how to use it, he winds up flooding the washroom, discovering magnum condoms and a bottle of Viagra. Later in the film, a goat (yep, a goat) finds its way into said washroom, ingesting the little blue pills and resultantly dry-humping Whitaker while Mencia tries to pull it off in a provocative — from behind — manner.

These scenes are played with the broadest comedic sense possible, which is to say that they aren't at all funny. There's no subtlety, relevance or satire, only static shots of characters making goofy, exaggerated faces without any sense of comic timing. Now, if Whitaker had mentioned, while standing up and brushing his clothes off from the attempted animal rape, "I recently won an Oscar," that would have been amusing.

This can be said for the entire film, which details the racial/religious/class differences between the families of two young lovers — a Latina Lucia Ramirez (America Ferrera) and an African-American Marcus Boyd (Lance Gross) — with excess dead air, an inconsistent tone and disastrous pacing. To boot, it's shot almost entirely in close-ups without framing or establishing shots so that neither context nor relief is provided from the lifeless dialogue.

And for all the hullabaloo over race, with an ignorant slight finding its way into every scene, the overall message of this apparent comedy seems to be that men need to appreciate their women while women need to be less neurotic — a groundbreaking revelation. Conversations dote on the female fear of becoming chattel and the male need to pollinate as many flowers as possible.

One thing that almost makes it all worthwhile is the casting of Forest Whitaker as a ladies man. It's nice to see him play something other than a schizophrenic.
(Fox)

Latest Coverage