Bringing Down the House (March 6/03)

Though Bringing Down the House is a tremendously uneven comedy - some scenes are quite funny, while others are deathly dull - the ample charisma of all the leads (and even a few supporting performers) ensures that the film always remains watchable.

Steve Martin stars as Peter, a recently divorced tax attorney who's been courting a woman online. When the time comes for them to meet, Peter shocked when Charlene (Queen Latifah) - a large black woman that's just been released from prison - shows up at his door. Despite his best efforts to remove her from his life, Charlene keeps popping up and refuses to leave until Peter agrees to help her with her case. Because he wants to impress an important client named Mrs. Arness (played by Joan Plowright), Peter reluctantly offers Charlene his services - if only to ensure that she'll stop embarrassing him.

Bringing Down the House has been directed by Adam Shankman, whose track record thus far is simply awful. His first feature-length film, The Wedding Planner, was one of the worst romantic comedies ever made - while his next, A Walk to Remember was just laughably bad all around. Since he's never been given a decent script to work with - all three of his films, including this one, have been rife with clichés - it's hard to discern whether their failure is mostly his fault. One thing's for sure: the man needs to learn how to slice and dice his movies. Bringing down the House runs much longer than it should, probably by a good half hour, and the inflated running time means that a lot of sequences eventually become dull (even those that started out with promise).

And then there are scenes that should have been excised completely. A good example of this would be a dinner party that comes late in the picture, with Charlene forced to act as Peter's cook while he attempts to woo Mrs. Arness. The underlying joke in this sequence has to do with Charlene's attempt to get back at Mrs. Arness (she's a bit of a racist, you see) by sneaking some laxative onto her food - but wouldn't you know it, Martin's character winds up with her plate. Shankman (not to mention screenwriter Jason Filardi) surely thought this would equal comic gold, but with such a tired concept, the only thing it equals is boredom within the audience.

But what ends up saving sequences like that are the above-average performances, led by Martin and Latifah. The film is peppered with familiar faces in small roles (including the criminally underused Michael Rosenbaum and Steve Harris), and the stars are often called upon to elevate the mediocre script. There's no denying that the odd couple chemistry between Martin and Latifah works, and the fish-out-of-water culture clash that ensues as he's introduced to her world (and vice versa) definitely propels the film forward. And though Betty White pops up as a racist neighbor of Peter's, her subplot never comes to the resolution we'd expect (she either should've gotten her comeuppance courtesy of Charlene or started talking in Ebonics)...or any resolution at all, for that matter.

Like last month's Old School, Bringing Down the House manages to remain entertaining in spite of the lackluster script. It really comes down to the charisma and charm of the actors, and since Martin rarely appears in comedies nowadays, the film might just be worth a look for him alone. And hey, there's something to be said for a film that features Joan Plowright (an Oscar winner best known for playing stuffy upperclass types) getting high with a couple of black dudes in a strip joint.