Rated PG-13 for crude and sexual content, language and some drug references.
114 Minutes
114 Minutes
Written and Directed By: Malcolm D. Lee
Staring: Martin Lawrence, James Earl Jones, Margaret Avery, Joy Bryant, Cedric The Entertainer, Nicole Ari Parker, Michael Clarke Duncan, Mike Epps, Mo’Nique, and Brooke Lyons
Staring: Martin Lawrence, James Earl Jones, Margaret Avery, Joy Bryant, Cedric The Entertainer, Nicole Ari Parker, Michael Clarke Duncan, Mike Epps, Mo’Nique, and Brooke Lyons
Synopsis
A successful talk show host leaves Los Angeles to reunite with his family in the Deep South.
Review
Martin Lawrence is at his best when he plays a bumbling, neurotic character and in Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins he had that opportunity. The rich and successful talk show host returns home after nine years of being absent and exposes his Hollywood match up to his down to earth southern family, and his old crush. Unfortunately, what happens with this talented cast is it basically recycles jokes and scenarios from other films of it’s likeness. It becomes so loud and obnoxious, it becomes barely watchable at points.
If there is supposed to be some lesson RJ is learning, and taught by his boisterous family it becomes lost in mean spirited behavior, that has no moral value, and is simply cruel. In the end no one is really going to care if Roscoe returns home, because the film taught us that running away for nine years may have been the right choice in the first place. Unfortunately, after awhile it’s clear he’s just as selfish and nasty as the rest of his bunch anyway.
This movie perpetuates cruelty, jokes that are not embracing stereotypes, but instead exploiting them, and passing the same old jokes off as original. The character’s all fit nicely into a pigeon holing of a low brow southern family, and it just wasn’t funny. Martin Lawrence is brilliant and it’s painful to watch him make such a loud pointless movie. This was a sad compilation of mostly non-funny with a group of incredibly funny people. What a dejecting conclusion.