The Best Man Holiday, written and directed by Malcolm D. Lee. Starring Morris Chestnut, Terrence Howard, Taye Diggs, Nia Long, Sanaa Lathan and Harold Perrineau.
Rating: 6 (out of 10)
Like the first The Best Man film back in 1999, The Best Man Holiday focuses on four friends and their ego clashes, crises of faith and relationship issues. But this time around there's more holiday bling.
The opening credits double as flashbacks to fill us in on the story arcs from the first film. Harper (Taye Diggs) is having a hard time writing a follow-up to his first bestselling book. He and wife Robyn (Sanaa Lathan) are expecting their first child after a string of miscarriages and costly in vitro procedures. Jordan (Nia Long) is a high-powered exec who still hasn't told her friends about her white boyfriend (Eddie Cibrian).
The school founded by Julian (Harold Perrineau) is threatened by his wife Candy's (Regina Hall) colourful past. Quentin (Terrence Howard ) is a marketing exec who gets paid to tell white people what black folks like, and still beds anything with a pulse, while Shelby (Melissa De Soussa) is fresh off a stint on Real Housewives. Running-back Lance (Morris Chestnut) is close to retirement and an NFL record but has more pressing issues at home; his wife (Monica Calhoun) is the catalyst for bringing all the friends back together.
These friends bring so much baggage - literal and metaphorical - to the Christmas weekend that there's hardly enough screen time to deal with it all, though director Malcolm D. Lee tries: the film comes in at an overlong 124 minutes. The film is all about equal-opportunity eyecandy: the four hunky men are obligingly shirtless from time to time, and the couture-clad wives and girlfriends are all cleavage, all the time. The house is to-die-for, all dressed up for the holiday; ditto the children, seen and not heard. It all harkens back to a more glamorous time, when we didn't need the sweaty, panting childbirth scene: it's less likely, but much more pleasant, to see Robyn refreshed and sitting up with her hair done.
Not that Best Man is completely sanitized: there is sex-talk aplenty (which woman can best "rock the mic") and an epic girlfight during which moms drop f-bombs in front of the kiddies. And all the goodtime ingredients are here, right down to a Christmas singalong, a Hail Mary football scene and a throwback New Edition dance routine.
While there is some degree of mommy porn in the form of foot massages and men who do the grocery shopping, the female characters exist only to define their male counterparts. Some actors (Long, for one) fare better than others with limited material.
There are other missteps, to be sure. It's unlikely, for example, that hours after burying his beloved wife one character would wisecrack "I know my way around a vagina."
Lee pilots a sleigh full of life lessons about being open to love and trusting in God and manages to squeeze in a record number of film clichés and plot twists you can see a mile away. But the charm of the ensemble cast makes The Best Man Holiday enjoyable nonetheless. If you go in expecting a feature-length soap opera and some Christmas kitsch, you won't be disappointed.
