First there was Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Stanley Kramer’s 1967 comedy-drama about a well-off white couple thrown for a loop when their daughter introduces them to her African-American fiancee that ultimately did for penetrating examinations of race relations in America at the time what Olive Garden does for Italian food—offer up a bland simulacrum for people who wanted to feel somehow enriched while never actually stepping out of their comfort zones. A few decades down the line came Guess Who, a more overtly comedic reversal of the premise starring Bernie Mac and Ashton Kutcher that I know I saw at the time but have retained absolutely no memory of it otherwise, which I suspect is probably for the best. Now comes You People and while it isn’t an official remake, it does utilize some of the same elements as those previous outings, along with a couple of additional wrinkles for good measure. Once again, the results just don’t work particularly well, either as rude comedy or as pointed social commentary.
Ezra Cohen (Jonah Hill, who also co-wrote the screenplay with director Kenya Barris) is a guy who works in a financial office but whose real passion is the podcast that he co-hosts with best friend Mo (Sam Jay). Not surprisingly, he is still single, though his overly doting mother, Shelley (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is borderline obsessed with changing that particular status. Before too long, he has a Meet Cute with Amira Mohammed (Lauren London) and the two quickly hit it off. As you can possibly surmise from their names, Ezra is Jewish and Amira is Muslim and while that makes no difference to them or their feelings for each other, it does become a seemingly insurmountable hurdle when it comes to the unavoidable task of meeting each others parents.
When Ezra brings Amira home, Shelley and dad Arnold (David Duchovny) attempt to illustrate their collective wokeness in cringe-inducing ways that make the parents in Get Out seem subtle and laid-back by comparison. That turns out to be nothing in comparison to the grilling that Ezra faces when he meets Amira’s parents, Akbar (Eddie Murphy) and Fatima (Nia Long), who are both fairly appalled with their daughter’s choice for a potential husband. And yet, even as after the first meeting between the two families ends in disaster, the two kids are still determined to get hitched and Shelley and Akbar are both seemingly determined to see the whole thing scuttled—in Shelley’s case, unintentionally as she constantly mortifies by her heavy-handed attempts to show how accepting she is of Amira, and most definitely intentionally in Akbar’s case as he goes to great lengths to humiliate Ezra and prove that he is unworthy of Amira.
The film does have one very funny sustained scene in its favor, the centerpiece sequence where the two families meet for dinner and the strained attempts at politeness soon fall by the wayside as the increasingly barbed comments between Shelley and Akbar regarding their respective faiths ratchet up the tension until the entire meal goes quite literally up in smoke. Granted, the jokes are never quite as provocative or cutting-edge as the screenplay clearly wants to believe that they are—sure, the punchline involving Louis Farrakhan is funny but how many people in the presumed target audience are likely to even get the joke in the first place?—but former SNL castmates Murphy and Louis-Dreyfus play off of each other with the kind of energy that was never really there during their on-screen interactions at their old stomping grounds (when the show utterly failed to recognize or give voice to her considerable comedic talents) and scores enough laughs to make you think that You People might be able to somehow justify its existence after all.
Ultimately, it doesn’t and it fails to do so for two basic reasons. For starters, there is never any point where we actually believe in Ezra and Amira as a plausible romantic couple, therefore making it impossible to care at all whether they are able to get past the attitudes and behaviors of their parents and make it to the altar after all. Of course, the romantic chemistry in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner between Sidney Poitier and Katherine Houghton wasn’t especially believable either but Poitier, then at the apex of his stardom, managed to conjure up enough movie star charisma for the both of them. An even more damaging problem is that the film has clearly elected to utilize the improv-heavy approach that made Judd Apatow a fortune. At best, the results are hit-and-miss as every momentarily amusing bit on display is offset by exchanges that go on for a long time without ever finding a proper comedic groove. Had some of these bits been cut down to a more manageable size, the laugh count would not increase one bit but the film as a whole could have been a lot shorter, which could only be an improvement in this case.
You People does have a few laughs here and there (Duchovny actually scores many of them), certainly more than Guess Who could muster, and it will serve as an invaluable document for those curious to see what Hal Linden looks like these days. That said, the film is just too unfocused for its own good and never comes close to tackling the kind of uncomfortable truths that might have made for truly funny and penetrating comedy. As a result, my guess is that it will ultimately slip into obscurity as quickly as Guess Who did, resurfacing only during that inevitable moment in the future when someone gets the bright idea to give the Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner template yet another go-around.