Guess Who

Ostensibly, Guess Who is a comedy. In reality, several critics conclude, it's not very funny. Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times says that the film -- intended to be a modern update of Stanley Kramer's 38-year-old film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner -- includes several scenes which are intended to be funny, but sit there uncomfortably on the screen. Lou Lumenick in the New York Post remarks that Guess Who uses two-fifths of the title and gives us one-tenth the entertainment value. On ABC's Good Morning America, Joel Siegel showed several scenes from the film, then remarked: Those are clips the studio sent, the stuff they think is funny. ... The only person I ... could recommend this movie to: Ben Affleck. He'll love it. Get him off the hook for Gigli and Jersey Girl. In print, Eleanor Ringel Gillespie in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution describes some of the same scenes, then asks, Are we laughing yet? Her conclusion: Guess Who isn't very smart and it isn't very funny. In fact, it isn't much of anything. The original film was the first to explore interracial marriage on the screen. (Today it seems awkward and dated, the critics agree). Boston Globe critic Wesley Morris (who is black) notes in his review: Nothing in the new movie's press notes mentions the old one. The races are reversed, and the sermons have been replaced with slapstick. This puts Guess Who in closer company with Meet the Parents. (Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times thinks it's more like The Jeffersons, minus its caustic wit.) Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal makes a similar case, commenting that the movie amounts to a comic premise borrowed, turned around and dumbed down to the level of sketch or sub-sketch humor. It is, he acknowledges, a shrewd commercial calculation [but] I must also say that its empty-headedness is appalling. Indeed, Claudia Puig is USA Today remarks that the film should more appropriately have been called, Dude, Meet the Black Parents. A.O. Scott in the New York Times suggests that the film's blandness has less to do with caution than with comfort since interracial marriage has found greater acceptance since 1967 -- which may be one of the reasons this movie is so much worse than its predecessor. The film does receive some polite applause from a handful of critics. Carrie Rickey in the Philadelphia Inquirer asks, What's not to like about a movie that concludes that although race can divide people, love can unite them? And Bob Strauss in the Los Angeles Daily News concludes that the movie is consistently funny, sometimes hilarious. Some things indeed have gotten better since the 1960s. Movies usually aren't included in that group, but in this case, I'd much rather come to Guess Who than Dinner.