A Christmas fail
Reviewing something outside of my comfort zone is always a challenge. I don’t know much about the upper-middle class Christian black life that’s central to The Best Man Holiday. However, that alone shouldn’t deter anyone from checking out a movie. After all, isn’t the whole point of cinema to show us something from the lives of strangers?
With that in mind, how did I — a nerdy, overweight 21-year-old Asian — like the very black, very middle-age The Best Man Holiday?
I didn’t. It sucked. It sucked longer and harder than any Dyson vacuum could ever dream of. It sucked so wretchedly that I could barely even see straight after stumbling out of the theater. The sucking was continuous, too, not a sporadic, intermittent suck, but a constant, soul-draining suck.
The Best Man Holiday starts sucking from the very first frame, when an iMovie postcard montage takes us through a magical tour of the original The Best Man movie. Harper Stewart (Taye Diggs, Baggage Claim) was some successful writer who was friends with football legend Lance Sullivan (Morris Chestnut, Kick-Ass 2), but not really because of an extramarital affair involving his wife.
Fast forward almost 15 years, and Stewart is looking to make a comeback by writing the Sullivan biography. Meanwhile, mutual friend and zany lothario Quentin (Terrence Howard, Prisoners) is trying to bed other mutual friend and star of The Real Housewives of Westchester Shelby (Melissa De Sousa, Ashes) who, in turn, is trying to bed other mutual friend Julian (Harold Perrineau, Sexy Evil Genius), etc.
The Best Man Holiday — or more accurately, its intentions — has some merit. The upper-middle class is far too often reserved for white characters in Hollywood, so a black version of This is 40 is still a rarity and cause for celebration. On the other hand, there’s no reason the characters in The Best Man Holiday need to be as alienating as the whiny cast of This is 40.
The problem is that writer and director Malcolm D. Lee (Scary Movie 5) wrote his script with no subtlety, bathing and miring everything in the same drippy, religious morality and sentimentality. Even if you are part of the target audience, The Best Man Holiday does nothing except pander, breaking up the unbearably soapy plot beats with off-color racial in-jokes and (sometimes literal) dick-waving.
To me, The Best Man Holiday was straight-up unendurable. Suffering through it is less like watching a movie and more like being part of a captive audience for a live taping of a public access sitcom shot on location in Satan’s rectum.
The suck never lets up. After blowing through a good five climaxes, The Best Man Holiday still doggedly perseveres to a heinously bloated 122 minutes, determined to check off every single damn cliche in the Christmas, Christian and sports movie playbook before the credits roll.
From the maudlin, melodramatic plot to the never ending library of s—-y Christmas R&B songs, The Best Man Holiday isn’t so much a movie as it is a Soviet-style torture session. You could possibly enjoy it — there was a lot of raucous laughter throughout my screening — but restrain yourself from sprinting to your local cinema.
