JUMPING THE BROOM (Salim Akil). 108 minutes. Opens Friday (May 6). See listings. Rating: NN
Jumping The Broom tries to recreate the crowd-pleasing mix of laughs, tears and good Christian values of a Tyler Perry movie, but first-time director Salim Akil can’t quite get it right. The fact that his leads share zero chemistry doesn’t help matters.
The contrived comedy pits two about-to-be-joined-by-marriage African-American families from different social milieus against each other. Sabrina (Paula Patton) is a moneyed, Ivy League-educated lawyer, while her fiancé, Jason (Laz Alonso), has worked his way up from humble Brooklyn roots to become a Wall Street banker.
When Jason’s working-class family and friends, headed by his single mom (Loretta Devine), descend on Sabrina’s massive family estate on Martha’s Vineyard for the wedding, they predictably clash with Sabrina’s controlling mom (Angela Bassett) and dad (Brian Stokes Mitchell), who might be having marital problems of their own.
The situation would be more compelling if we knew something about the central couple – who, by the way, haven’t had sex for the six months they’ve known each other, a plot point that’s not followed through.
But Sabrina and Jason are cardboard characters, and Patton and Alonso bring nothing to them. The two have so little rapport that I began to suspect one of their characters was closeted, which would have explained the no-sex theme.
Fortunately, there’s more fun happening on the margins of the film. Sabrina’s maid of honour (Meagan Good) and the reception’s chef (CSI’s Gary Dourdan) sizzle in a couple of sexy scenes, while Tasha Smith and Romeo have a recurring gag as a younger guy-older woman pairing.
Bassett, woefully underused in film these days, seems to think she’s acting in a Greek tragedy. Better is Devine, who uses her high-pitched voice and lots of knowing glances to communicate years of frustration and pain that are only hinted at in the script.
