Taye Diggs (television’s Private Practice), Nia Long (Soul Food), Morris Chestnut (Kick-Ass 2), Harold Perrineau (Zero Dark Thirty), Terrence Howard (Hustle & Flow), Sanaa Lathan (Contagion), Monica Calhoun (Love & Basketball), Melissa De Sousa (Miss Congeniality) and Regina Hall (Scary Movie franchise) reprise their career-launching roles in The Best Man Holiday.
Indefatigably, The Best Man was one film that ushered in an era of comedy never seen before. Such was the expectation for this new chapter after fifteen years, The Best Man Holiday, when the same college friends finally reunite over the Christmas holidays.
You would hope they have grown wiser, or perhaps if not, that the plot alone had thickened, or that their lives have evolved into more complex ones. But it turns out that little wisdom has come with old age – it seldom does for movies based solely on jokes – and writer/director Malcolm D. Lee feverishly tries to rekindle a chemistry that informed his helming debut – a chemistry that barely catches fire in The Best Man Holiday.
D. Lee, who is fresh off Scary Movie 5, a movie not worth writing home about, may have also hoped that this reconnection with his past would resurrect his pedigree as a filmmaker. It has not. The Best Man Holiday, if it has accomplished anything at all, has undoubtedly supplied its long awaiting fans with laughter without substance.
The main characters in the plot, fifteen years hence, Lance (Morris Chestnut) and Mia (Monica Calhoun), look a more perfect couple. The NFL star that Lance has become, playing for the New York Giants, seem to have enamored him, and he looks largely the survivor of the revelation of Mia’s gargantuan lapse in fidelity in The Best Man. They have recalled the same friends from the wedding, and quite boldly, the man at the center of that infidelity, to stay for Christmas.
Harper (Taye Diggs), the villain from The Best Man, is facing a couple of challenges. Obstacles that you could say Lance perhaps smirks at. First, his latest novel continues to struggle finely placing him within the throes of a recovering writer and a one-hit wonder. Second, his wife Robyn (Sanaa Lathan), is also fraught with disappointment. Robyn has been plagued by wanting to have a baby too much, pregnancy has eluded her for years. Some jokes were directed towards Harper – his inability to summon his soldiers to march.
For Julian (Harold Perrineau) and his now tamed stripper-wife in Candace (Regina Hall), money seems to be the only big fat problem. But they seem to have matured a whole lot more than the rest. Both Julian and Candace run a school but are in desperate need of donors, who happen to be white.
Yet, fifteen years on, three of the crew remain bachelors and a spinster. Quentin (Howard) seems rather unperturbed by it. In fact, he enjoys every bit of the moment – a professional bachelor – huffing and puffing rolls of marijuana at his every breath. Not without sharing a moment of such sentience with Mia before she finally succumbed to her cancer.
Ms. Shelby (Melissa De Souza) on the other hand, has successfully integrated into The Real Housewives of Westschester, leaving her with no other suitors than her fellow multi-divorcees on the show itself. She still harbors more than a cursory regret over Julian who seemed to have moved on, even when an old porn video of Candace surfaced on the internet and nearly ruined their marriage, and caused school donors to run for cover.
Publishing powerhouse Jordan (Nia Long) has a load of trouble committing to her Caucasian boyfriend (Eddie Cibrian). Jordan is memorable in this regard. She dawns the far-epitome of an independent black woman – the very sought-after kind, and a very employed black woman who seems to have not gotten over Harper quite yet. She runs a major cable news network. She will not stoop for no low-achieving, unambitious and success-confounding black man. Definitely not one with a prison record.
Sequels with this much time between installments are rare. Usually when one floats in the horizon, there’s never a good reason. It is largely either solely financial or just plain fandom. Tron and Tron: Legacy, have a 28-year separation, Psycho and Psycho II, have 22 years between them, and Rambo III and Rambo display a 19-year reboot.
Hence The Best Man Holiday did some lifting from the old in order to re-inform its audience where the characters had left off. Obviously the amount of exposition coupled with clips of the original movie, though reminded viewers there actually was an original film, essentially raffled the sense of unity of plot and picture that this film needed in order to separate itself as a real sequel and not merely a side kick of Lee’s.
The plot is melodramatic at best. Switching from talking about dick and pussy, to writing books, to clowning one another, to catching a terrible disease in cancer, to God and praying, and from football to dying, and pregancy, childbirth, you name it, painted a broad picture of the lack of direction of the film. At this instance, the film resembles a Tyler Perry knockoff, like Jumping The Broom, at best. It is replete with Christian innuendos and the broad antics of the characters perturbed the whole structure of the film.
The meandering storyline, through cancer revelations, oral sex comparisons, miscarriage fears, and Harper’s ungodly planning to work up his estranged college friend Lance for a chance to co-author his autobiography were tedious to watch and keep track of. Perhaps, the plot was caught up in the rush of a reunion, forgetting to focus on a worthwhile story.
Watching Lee flounder with his own material is boggling.
So much so that when in the end he seems to promise a third installment, you shiver and shudder at the idea itself. Hopefully that joke falls on him. There is perhaps no guarantee. And properly so!
For, though I wouldn’t advocate another Best Man story ever, if at all it does happen, a long wait is Best before the idea buds.
