02/20/2023
You People is an interracial romantic comedy on Netflix with a promising cast: Jonah Hill, some black actress I never heard of, Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Jonah’s embarrassing Jewish mom, and Eddie Murphy as his fiancé’s glaring well-to-do Black Muslim dad. The screenplay is by Hill and Kenya Barris, who makes TV shows about affluent blacks, such as Blackish.
But the writers forgot the timeless advice that producer Leon Schlesinger gave his Looney Tunes animators in the lisping voice upon which Mel Blanc modeled Daffy Duck’s voice: “Put in lotth of joketh, fellowth. Joketh are funny!”
So the dialogue is only mildly amusing. In particular, Murphy is mostly wasted playing the black equivalent of Robert DeNiro’s stern future father-in-law in Meet the Parents.
The well-tanned Hill looks like he’s spending a lot of time outdoors exercising (he’s going to play golfer John Daly in a biopic) to get down from obese to merely overweight. Good for him. But his improved lifestyle makes him wrinkly, which doesn’t fit well with his over-grown adolescent persona. (I always picture him as Seth Rogen’s kid brother.)
And the racial commentary dialogue is almost all painfully on the nose.
Jewish organizations are outraged that Murphy’s angry black man character points out that Jews are doing well economically today and that some Jews were involved in the slave trade in the past. But the movie’s not good enough to make it worth delving into these controversies.
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