Untitled

Big Momma's House
Directed by
Starring : Martin Lawrence, Paul Giamatti,
Nia Long
(available on video)
1/2 * (One Half of One Star)

Nutty Professor 2 : The Klumps
Directed by Steve
Starring : Eddie Murphy, Janet Jackson,
Larry Miller
(available on video)
* 1/2 (One and a Half Stars)

Martin Lawrence, essentially re-making ‘Blue Streak’ - a film I’d describe with the word
brain dead - doesn’t earn such a lofty compliment with the entirely uninspired ‘Big
Momma’s House’. Both films follow the exploits of tiny, unfunny Martin Lawrence in
cognito, with the most banal of set-ups, attempting to squeeze jokes out of every corner -
and failing miserably.
        What makes 'Big Momma's House' particularly pungent (besides Giamatti's streak of appearing in good films - which he breaks here), is the thirty minute first act that builds invisible ploy upon translucent plot point in order to complete its objective : Get Lawrence in the foam rubber Momma suit. Once he gets in there, the movie only seems more funny. The unfortunate thing is that the real Big Momma is kinda interesting - but she leaves in an early scene and doesn't return until the end of the movie. Point made, right? If Martin Lawrence's Big Momma can't be more funny than the actual Big Momma - who isn't all that funny, but occasionally does something witty - do we even have a movie? No, we don't. We have an egotist who needs to go back to stand-up - or the crack he crawled out of.
        What makes ‘Nutty Professor II : The Klumps’, a film which features skinny, dwindling
comic Eddie Murphy inside a series of large, fat person (several of which are female)
suits, somewhat inspired, is that the jokes are, for the most part, on. Nevermind that the
sequel to the very, very funny (often not at the expense of itself) ‘The Nutty Professor’ is
a lot less funny and a lot more retread than anything else; it still beats ‘Big Momma’s
House’ in any laugh-a-thon you could enter it in, with its hands tied behind its back. Seeing Murphy as the Klumps, the way he wraps his voices around their mumbly, grumpy, always hungry
personas is - at the very least - a cheap laugh. Lawrence doesn’t even afford us that. His
Big Momma rarely does anything remotely funny. It took so much set-up to get
Lawrence, an undercover FBI agent, into the fat suit - once he’s there, the dynamite is
wet - everything seems muted. Not that the script was well-built to begin with - the jokes
could appear in three or four minutes of any film and have the same level of comedic
power. Lawrence, as always, is content to elongate a short, sketch-worthy gag into just
under ninety minutes. He would’ve worked well on Saturday Night Live.
        'Nutty Professor II : The Klumps' has its problems, too. Most of the film isn't really all that entertaining, the characters doing the same thing over and over and over. Great scenes often include Murphy as the oldest Klump, the grandmother - being overtly bawdy and unnecessarily sexual. Even this gets rather old after awhile.
        What I like about the film, in particular, is that there still remains a well-directed, exceedingly fascinating scene where Murphy plays all of his relatives at a dinner table - and manages to hit high notes with each one. He interacts so well with himself, proving he has these characters down, that I figured a film whose subtitle was 'The Klumps' would have more scenes of the whole family duking it out - and just plain razzing each other. The film is dry - and Sherman has become far too sympathetic in this installment which, itself is a little light on story continuity and plausibility (and certainly too labored in a sequence lampooning 'Star Wars', '2001 : A Space Odyssey' and 'Armageddon' that is a miserable failure). 'The Nutty Professor II : The Klumps' turns out to be some strange concoction of Howard Hawks formula of "three great scenes and no bad scenes" that turns out to be one really good scene that's an extended version of one from the first film - and a ton of flat, really off-key "story" scenes. This is a film that could've benefited wonderfully from indulgence. That's rare. And kinda scary.
        On the other hand - how many movies can you see comedian Larry Miller get raped by a hamster only to say : "Look Mommy, there's the hamster's bitch!".

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