La guerre des pères

America Ferreira and Lance Gross tell their fathers - hers, Carlos Mencia, his Forest Whitaker - they want to get married. Now there's the problem of the wedding, with all the attendant problems of blending their Mexican and Black heritages.

It's a good version of the standard movie of the fighting and angst of every movie about the problems leading up to the wedding, with all of the incidents so common to this sort of film, with a lot of soul-searching and spats that attend such films. It's helped along by a fine cast, including Regina Kimg and Angela's Johnson-Reyes, but the majority of the focus is on the fathers.

If you enjoyed this movie, your favorite bits will vary, but my favorite scenes are those shared by Whitaker and Gross, who speak together as if they are father and son, lovingly and sincerely.

Bob

"Our Family Wedding" has some good actors and two great actors, Forest Whitaker and America Ferrera, but a horrible script. A young interracial couple travel back home to tell their families they're getting married and to plan a quick wedding. Their fathers, their cultures and their families clash. This is just rehashed material and no better than a poor man's "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner".

They were going for laughs, and although I did laugh-out-loud in a few scenes, most of the lines were just rude, and all of the characters, especially Whitaker's, were just being insubordinate. Every character had friction with one another and sometimes we weren't even privy to the reasons, so not only were we not laughing, we're frustrated as well.

The few laughs were not enough to overcome the frustration and many pointless scenes. Even if they were going for drama instead, there is no sense of drama just from watching characters act in horrible ways because the script tells them to. I can't really recommend "Our Family Wedding", only possibly to die-hard fans of the genre and fans of America Ferrera. This is a Ferrera we haven't seen before, mature and subdued, and she at least was nice to watch.

I just watch it and as a Mexican (born and raised in a small town out in the country and living on the city too) I can tell you this is not how we do weddings. It meant to be funny but is not

Our Family Wedding is a grim prospect on its face: a frantic wedding movie meets an uproarious culture clash movie, where two patriarchs - the smooth African-American and the fiery Latino - do hilarious battle and then there's some romance somewhere. It fails to deliver even on that meagre promise. Forest Whittaker and Carlos Mencia play the fathers of young lovers Marcus and Lucia (Lance Gross and America Ferrera) who return home to L.A. to announce their surprise engagement and plans to be married immediately. Things get complicated, when we learn that Lucia's family don't really like black people, and Marcus' father, a neat-freak radio DJ-cum-ladies'-man, doesn't like Mexican people. Predicaments predictably follow, in the proper order and to factory specifications.

Despite a legitimately (for the most part) talented cast and a set-up almost guaranteed to be worth at least a few forced laughs, the film manages to be almost completely devoid of humour. It's a punishing, depressing display. The film knows what beats to hit, and tries with heroic, military determination to hit them only to fail, every single time. We're presented with the really uncomfortable knowledge that the film knows it should be funny, here, here and here, and is really trying, honest - see how the goat tries to have sex with the fancy man!? - but just can't quite haul it's hackneyed self anywhere close to an actual laugh. It's ugly and it tries to make you complicit in its ugliness, like when you walk in on your roommate three quarters of the way through an extra large pizza and they try and make you eat the last slice.

To do the obvious thing and fail at it is the worst thing an artist can do. To offer a thin-gruel compromise to your audience, to say "here's a trite, rote ethnicity-clash wedding comedy that you know will be derivative but what else are you going to watch come on it can't be terrible" and then to hand them something terrible is just... rude. To ask us to watch Carlos Mencia flail his way through a grim, graceless Mr. Hulot-inspired bit of non-comedy is mean, and makes us feel badly about ourselves and the choices that brought us here.

One bright spot: Anjelah Johnson as the tomboy sister of the bride is the only actor in the film that's able to wring a couple of laughs out of it, and the sisters' relationship is one of the only interesting things in a film that's otherwise not much more than a grim procession of joyless clichés. 2/10

This movie was OK but the plot's been used many times before. Guy and girl come home to parents and announce they are getting married. Then both families have to get along as they plan the wedding. And of course either the dads or the moms don't get along. In this case, it's the dad that don't get along. It starts from the beginning as Lucia's dad, Miguel, whom tows trucks, picks up Marcus's dads, Brad, car to impound. Brad arrives in time but Miguel still tows the car. Then they have dinner with their kids that night and meet for the second time and find out they are to be in laws. So much quarreling ensues.

The best scene is when Migual and Brad go to this bar to find a dj and Miguel gets hammered on pink nipples. Of course, the kids have second thoughts but everything works out in the end.

FINAL VERDICT: Not very interesting. Skip it.