Our Family Wedding

The real disappointment isn’t that Our Family Wedding is mostly unfunny or mostly unoriginal; it’s that the film never tries to go beneath the surface. The comedy—what there is of it—is mostly racial in nature, and while there’s no responsibility on the filmmakers’ part to present something more incisive, why merely dust off outdated stereotypes for the purposes of cheap, infrequent laughs? With a Latin woman (America Ferrera) marrying an African-American man (Lance Gross), there could be a real culture clash to shine a light on, but to ignore it in favor of tired, hammy pratfalls and old jokes about whether or not what they say about black men is true clearly isn’t the way to go—especially when it’s as poorly written as this. Carlos Mencia and Forest Whitaker co-star as feuding fathers-in-law. It’s nice to know that Whitaker can use his Oscar as a springboard for terrible movies like this.