The Lost Daughter: ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

In Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another multiracial leftist militants and conspiratorial white supremacists share a love of codewords, rituals, purity tests, and in-fighting. In fact, they’re so concerned with their own inner workings, that we see the actual plot of the movie is an almost inconsequential side-story to these groups’ larger aims. Without drawing a false equivalency, or even clean lines of ideological dispute other than clearly preferring the doomed progressive impulses to the drooling cartoon evil of racist authoritarians, the movie becomes a picture of a well-intentioned father-daughter pair just trying to survive. “I don’t get angry about anything anymore,” says the man, a former explosives expert for that leftist terrorist organization who now spends his days in hiding smoking weed and worrying that the government, or his ex-wife, will come knocking at the small house he shares with his teenage daughter. One gets the sense that so much fear and anger has passed in the decade-and-a-half of hiding that he’s just tired of caring. He just wants his daughter safe. 

It makes for an electrifying contemporaneous American film. Anderson uses imagery of immigration raids, paramilitary invasions, and police harassing protestors as so much vivid, dangerous backdrop to a quite simple chase story embellished with literally sensational filmmaking focused on a roving camera, booming sound, and sequences chockablock with eccentric characters down to the smallest bit parts. It’s a lot of movie: a big, filmic beauty with exacting set-pieces and satisfying spectacle. Even so, Anderson swerves from the expected. It opens with what appears to be a doomed romance between Rocket Man (Leonardo DiCaprio), a slightly off-tempo activist, and the imperious militant Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). She casts a strong impression as she almost instantly becomes a more complicated, hard-edged character who first secretly betrays him, then allows her hair-trigger propensity for violence to put her in a position from which she rats out the group. For appearing only in the prologue, her complications—and struts and stares—linger over the picture. She, and the dizzying political backdrop, is refracted in the relatively small story that follows as it’s blown up to epic proportions. The paranoid ex-radical DiCaprio is separated from his daughter (Chase Infiniti) when a paramilitary strike force (led by a wacky intense Sean Penn) takes over their small town in an immigration raid intended as a distraction for a personal revenge extraction. 

What follows is an overflow of action and activity, dense sequences with constant detail and movements, by turns sharply satirical and propulsively suspenseful, sometimes in the same moment. Somehow it manages to be a biting political cartoon, a hard-charging suspense picture, a bustling tossed-off portrait of marginalized communities, and an earnestly sentimental father-daughter picture. The result is a deeply on-edge hurly-burly whirligig of a picture, at once sweeping and small, chaotic and contained, wickedly raucous and righteously angry. DiCaprio floats through the chaos, pushing through the haze to find the right passwords and coordinates to rendezvous with his daughter, and to avoid the personal vendetta of the evil Colonel Jockjaw (the names are pure Pynchon, whose novel Vineland loosely inspired the movie). How dreadful to see the villain is emboldened to use the cover of law enforcement to selfishly chase the ghosts of his past and find favor in the secretive suits who literally lurk in underground layers. It’s in the dichotomies that the movie holds its bold, slippery power. Here a country is slipping into authoritarianism and tearing itself apart, between the boot heels hoping to stomp and the wide variety of resistance that pushes back. One group of radicals exits as others are born. One villain is taken down, but the system remains. There’s no winning the war, just the next battle, and the next. 

It becomes a movie about the legacy of struggle and division that each generation leaves for the next, this American life as a constant messy push-and-pull for progress in the face of old-fashioned backlash and repression, and those who’d use the struggle as excuse to wreak havoc. It’s also a movie about how caring for individuals is always better than centering violence. The latter is ideology as power; the former is real power. Consider the squabbling pedantic radicals on a circular hotline juxtaposed with the chill warmth of Benicio del Toro’s calm karate master who casually floats through his city’s underground communities, a steady center around which much activity orbits as he’s offering aid around every corner. (A long wandering take through his underground railroad’s maze of doors and corridors and tunnels as he confidently takes care of business while DiCaprio unravels behind him is a highlight.) 

I wish the movie had more time for its choice supporting players. Anderson’s usually so good at elucidating complicated relationships, like in The Master’s cult-leader-and-convert or Phantom Thread and Licorice Pizza’s romantic infatuations as power plays. But here they just breeze by. Only Del Toro really pops, and there’s entirely too much Penn, and the rest of the ensemble (from Regina Hall to Alana Haim) is just evocative fleeting impressions. I especially wanted to know more about what drove the father, and the daughter’s political perspective, and how they filled regular days. But the strong shorthand of Chase Infiniti’s rooting charisma, a blend of vulnerable and inviolable, and the stumbling melancholic comic urgency of DiCaprio, high out of his mind, flailing around like a Millennial Lebowski, make for a sturdy through line as the camera’s elegant tracking shots and jangled score find laughter and twists in the live-wire energy of now. Through its wild comedy and dark action, it sees all manner of leftists are targets of civic violence from those wielding the force of quasi-military power, who are themselves split between matter-of-fact law enforcement and a collection of loose-cannon militias and bounty hunters. By the end, the only hope is that the next generation will be even slightly better than those who’ve left them this mess.

Bully Pulpit: HONK FOR JESUS. SAVE YOUR SOUL.

We’re swimming in phonies these days. Watch the pundits duly reciting talking points in defense of truly ridiculous and patently false premises—like, say, that the 2020 election was stolen, or that it’s normal for an ex-president to lie about returning topic secret documents he snuck into his golf resort—and you have to wonder if even they believe the preposterous things they’re saying. That tension has always been at the sleazy center of the televangelist, a push-pull between genuine religious sentiment and a straight up con. It seems as good a place as any to drill down into the sludge of disingenuous holier-than-thou demeanors that are so irritating in our culture. That’s the vein of hypocrisy and sympathy that The Eyes of Tammy Faye mined in its biopic stylings of a true scandal, ultimately finding the humanity in its lead’s good intentions. It’s also the richly hilarious terrain of the ongoing HBO comedy The Righteous Gemstones, a satiric, vulgar, and preposterous Southern Gothic King Lear in a tacky megachurch that’s somehow lovable, too. (That’s the Danny McBride special, I suppose.) And it finds perhaps its most literal expression of late in Honk For Jesus. Save Your Soul. Writer-director Adamma Ebo, expanding a short of the same name, makes a movie that splits its time, and sometimes even its scenes, between a flat digital parodic mockumentary and a more nuanced and compelling character drama unfolding in stark grainy scope.

Switching between these two modes is the story of a couple desperately spinning artifice to get out of a calamitous series of revelations. Preening pastor Childs (Sterling K. Brown) and his wife (Regina Hall) have closed their big Atlanta church following revelations of sexual impropriety on his part. Now they’re planning an Easter Sunday comeback, complete with a carefully stage-managed semi-confession and plea for PR redemption. Thus the camera crew following them around, catching grinning smiles hiding the panic behind their eyes. These scenes are full of frantic spin and empty braggadocio. They’re in full prosperity gospel mode, a greedy sermon building a monument to their own material success and calling it God’s. We’re meeting them past a scandal that has left them with only five members, and struggling to get the message out that they’re on the way back. But what we see of their flailing in front of the camera from these angles is all artifice slipping away. We’re presented standard ideas about materialism—a tour of an expensive wardrobe, a fleet of sports cars, two enormous golden thrones—and hypocrisy, like slipping out an expletive when stepping in gum. There are also surface glosses of mindless sermons. We never get a clear sense of their religious beliefs, beyond one blatantly homophobic speech setup for an ironic disjunction. Nor do we see if there’s any real missionary zeal beyond their need to be set apart as the focus of donations and attention.

That’s why the “real” scenes within the movie are a such a relief. Away from the self-conscious performances-within-performances of the faux-doc style (and in practice, that stuff is sitcom simple anyway), Hall and Brown are allowed to let their characterizations breathe. Hall, especially, is quite good as a woman clinging to a sinking relationship, trying to see her way toward staying, even, and despite, the deep pain that’s still there. The movie never quite tips its hand with the full details of the pastor’s indiscretions—just hints that he’s wooed young men with lavish gifts, and one semi-seduction scene that’s full of squirming suspense. So it’s difficult to ultimately judge for what he’s asking to be forgiven. Characters hint that they know more than we do, and the couple themselves certainly won’t confess on camera. But the scenes without the doc conceit let the implications linger, as they characters drop the act and talk frankly. They sing along to hardcore rap, explore sexual dysfunction, and cringe as they can’t prevent confrontations with the truth of what they’ve done from slipping out in conversation with former congregants in ways both shady and sharp. Hall sells the tough edges of resolve, the stubborn denial of trauma, and the uncertainty of potential forgiveness. Brown, for his part, is a fine unreflective peacock of a preacher, also skating just one slip from doom. The actors lift the script beyond the routine. If the movie’s halves cohered as well, and with as much depth and nuance, as its leads' performances, it’d really be something. So it’s two approaches to the same material in one film. Shame only one’s nearly worth it.

She's Having a Baby: WHEN THE BOUGH BREAKS

The one thing going for When the Bough Breaks, a bad psychological thriller with no psychology of any note, is its willingness to touch touchy subject matter. It loads up its twists with material about conception and pregnancies, domestic violence, sexual abuse, and children in danger. It walks right up to the edge of distasteful and touch, touch, touches the line like a nagging sibling wiggling a finger close enough to disturb the very edge of arm hair while repeating “I’m not touching you.” It wants credit for the will to transgress a line without actually having the bravery to back up its bluff. And yet that’s the only charge to speak of in this dishwater dull movie about a wealthy, happily married, infertile couple (Morris Chestnut and Regina Hall) that turns to a surrogate (Paper Towns’ Jaz Sinclair) who’ll carry their last viable embryo. Since you’re aware of the genre, you know that the shy dimply smiles and rosy generosity from all involved at the outset is bound to get creepy. It turns out the surrogate has undefined problems which threaten to destroy everything they hope for. All their eggs are in one basket case, so to speak.

Predictable to its core, the movie is built out of spare parts of others. Take bits of Obsessed, a better trashy thriller in which Ali Larter stalks Idris Elba to the dismay of his wife Beyoncé, and you’ll have some of the setup. The surrogate develops an unhealthy obsession with the husband of the couple whose baby she’s carrying. That’s twisted, and should be good creepy fun, or at the very least some low tacky camp, like a Fatal Attraction set off without an affair. Instead, her obsession is dialed up and down depending on the screenplay’s whims. So, too, are the feelings of the married couple. Sometimes they’re shrugging off weird behavior. Other times they’re scared, scrambling for a way to keep the surrogate happy, knowing how important a perfect delivery would be. Morris Chestnut and Regina Hall are great actors, and it’s a testament to their skill that they invest so much emotion in such flimsy, psychologically incoherent plot developments. It’s a thriller that develops its crisis points in fits and starts, hoping we forget looming red herrings and real problems alike as the characters do while trying to convince themselves everything’s okay.

It’s the sort of movie where, if you see a cat in the first act you know it’ll be flayed open in the nursery by the third act. If there’s a treasured family teddy bear, it’ll have its stuffing spread over the room. If there’s a nice glass patio table, it’ll smash. If a colleague (Romany Malco) stares at the surrogate, it’s so he’ll recognize her in a blackmail photo later. If a leering roofer mentions peeking in windows, guess where someone will spy an exhibitionist? (Also, the leaky pipe he mentions in the same conversation will be the reason it happens.) Jack Olsen’s screenplay is totally obvious and conventional, which is bad enough without taking a long time reaching its inevitable banal payoffs. Characters speak only what directly matters to the plot in flat, flimsy dialogue, and are only characterized insofar as it serves a story function. Hall’s character will want to throw a dinner party or two? Well, she’s a chef. Chestnut will need a reason to whip up legal documents with unbelievable speed? Well, he’s a lawyer. The whole thing is just too transparent about its clanking machinery as plot mechanics grind their gears.

So it’s not a good movie. It’s also not a good bad movie. The proceedings are bland, over-familiar, tediously derivative boredom. With a premise as juicy as this one, you think it’d be more than mildly troubling, but it’s not as shocking or sexy as it thinks, or as it easily could’ve been. Director Jon Cassar (of TV’s 24) brings a workmanlike proficiency to the screenplay’s weak provocations, keeping it at a polished cheap digital remove. (The production stills look sharper than the finished product.) It’s so under-thought it even finds unintentionally queasy accidental comedy, like when an info-dump including the line “she was abused” plays out as voice over while the woman in question shops for bananas. It’s just one bad decision after another. I mean, when you can’t even make Michael K. Williams playing a human plot hole plug entertaining – even when he bursts into the scene to immediately solve a missing person mystery with little more than “I got the address; let’s go!” – the movie’s got some irredeemable, fundamental problems.

The Shop Around the Corner: BARBERSHOP: THE NEXT CUT

It has been twelve years, but now the shaggy hangout vibe of the Barbershop comedies is back for a third time. It’s also the best one yet. Set in the same small independent black-owned barbershop on the south side of Chicago, Barbershop: The Next Cut gives up on being a movie and instead brings the charm as a big screen sitcom. This frees it up to be a comfortable location for staging sharply observed and warmly felt social commentary comedy, sparkling with smart sociological sentiment and compassionate character work. It’s written by veterans of TV comedy Kenya Barris (Black-ish) and Tracy Oliver (Survivor’s Remorse), who recognize the film’s strength is in making the barbershop a place we want to relax in, enjoying our fly-on-the-wall status as the various barbers, customers, and neighborhood regulars wander through. It’s a big-hearted welcoming movie with serious topics on its mind, but a light touch making it all go down easy.

The shop’s owner (Ice Cube, the series' nice center) is continuing in his father’s footsteps, making the establishment a gathering place for its employees and clients to shoot the breeze while getting their hair done. It’s a great location for a comedy, allowing a variety of characters to interact, talk out their differences, engage in funny banter, squabble and argue, fret and worry about the issues of the day, and find a way to work together. The barbershop is a stage for debates and riffs, parallel stand-up sets in progress punctuated by teasing chitchat. It now shares space – and rent – with the neighborhood beauty shop, which lends the proceedings an element of battle-of-the-sexes, but not in any reductive way. The result is merely one more outlet for a joking collision between various points of view, where the film draws its energy as an appealing clash of charismatic personalities.

The men (like old irritable Cedric the Entertainer, grayed and wrinkled by talented artists, and younger guys like Common, Lamorne Morris, and Utkarsh Ambudkar) and the women (including Regina Hall, Eve, and Nicki Minaj) have an interesting dynamic, dredging up usually unspoken resentments and deconstructing modern gender dynamics from surprising angles. The film lets them have their disagreements, finding common ground where it can and respecting their differences where it can’t. It’s fair that way, a safe space that allows them to discuss beauty standards, race relations, gang activity, gun violence, police misconduct, respectability politics, small business struggles, and more. It’s an amiable peacekeeping movie, not afraid to get serious when it needs to. The film finds a Chicago in pain, wracked with problems – homicides, poverty, broken institutions – people seem at a loss to fix. And yet there’s hope, positing that even small gestures of goodness can make a difference.

You can think of it as Chi-raq’s little cousin, and not because that’s what director Malcolm D. Lee is to Spike. Funnily enough, though it is less cinematically ambitious or angrily satirical, Barbershop: The Next Cut is a more consistent film, and no less politically engaged. It doesn’t take big swings, but it connects every time. Malcolm D. Lee is skilled with juggling tones and tracking motivations across a wide ensemble. (His Best Man Holiday, for example, is one of the better comic melodramas of late.) Here he weaves a deft dance of stereotype and insight, following not so much a story as it is loose strands of subplots woven together – romances, relationships, parenting problems, jealousies, business moves, and gang violence. He allows the characters to express a range of opinions, doubts, and conflicts, examining them in a casual, low-key, often-amusing tone well balanced with seriousness.

Though the look is sitcom bright and simple, there is heavy drama here. One dramatic subplot finds Cube’s son (Michael Rainey Jr.) drawing close to a gang leader (Tyga) who wants a new recruit. But there is also the lightest of light touches. Cut to J.B. Smoove as a smooth talking one-stop-shop with the kind of patter only he can bring, Anthony Anderson as a loud food truck entrepreneur, or Deon Cole as a daffy customer who seems to never leave, and we’re in a much sillier range. Like Black-ish, currently finishing its terrific second season on ABC, The Next Cut comes from a clear perspective, with great specificity to its humor and wearing a social consciousness on its sleeve. This animates and bolsters its attempts to present honest conversation in a way that keeps the comedy flowing without short-changing its important topics. The movie's appeal is best represented in the wheezing bluster of Cedric the Entertainer, whose elderly barber loves to mix it up with the youngsters and never seems to have a customer. (That memorably changes in a priceless scene in the end credits.) He just loves hanging out in this barbershop, and it’s easy to see why.

On the Road Again: VACATION

At least Vacation, the Harold Ramis-directed/John Hughes-scripted movie from 1983, started with a simple comic premise lampooning bad family car trips. By the time we reach the new combination remake/sequel Vacation, coming after three theatrical sequels and a direct-to-video spinoff, it starts to seem less like a relatable goof and more like a cruel punishment. Every member of the Griswold family is apparently doomed to a life of horrible vacations. If you have one terrible trip, you’ve had a terrible trip. But if you only have terrible trips, it must be you. At least a straightforward remake could’ve regained the original concept’s small charms. Maybe instead of this two-in-one reboot, what we really need is a prequel in which we finally learn how patriarch Gus Griswold insulted whichever warlock gave his family this curse.

The new Vacation is a podgy road trip swollen with an uneven collection of pit stops. The story goes like this. Rusty Griswold (Ed Helms) remembers fondly the great vacation his parents (Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo) took him on 32 years ago. So he wants to recreate it with his wife (Christina Applegate) and sons (Skyler Gisondo and Steele Stebbins). Misadventures ensue on their way from Illinois to California where Wally World awaits. It’s both the same, and different, making it the Jurassic World of comedies, right down to the endless repetition of the original’s main theme, unimpressive special effects, and characters who have an odd affection for decades-old events that within their world would’ve been inescapably scarring.

But that’s nothing that couldn’t be overcome with good jokes. I should have known writer-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan M. Goldstein, the screenwriters behind last year’s execrable Horrible Bosses 2, might not be up to the task. At least it’s not that bad. Every stop on the trip heads straight into cameos, in which funny people step into the picture for a brief moment and make it almost watchable. You can’t throw Keegan-Michael Key, Regina Hall, Leslie Mann, Chris Hemsworth, and Charlie Day into a movie and not have at least a few smile-worthy moments. Of the main cast, only Applegate got a laugh out of me. It’s supposed to be funny that the Griswolds are mostly oblivious, a bit rude, gullible, prone to bad decisions and saying awkward things, like when they mistakenly think slang for a sex act means a chaste kiss. A little of this family goes a long way.

Some scenes are mildly amusing, like their car’s confusing features, a man who doesn’t know there’s a rat on his shoulder, and a territorial dispute among police officers at the Four Corners Monument. But many scenes are consistently misjudged. Its dirtiness feels crass, dark humor plays sour, slapstick is just unpleasant, and gross out gags are only gross. If you think the idea of a grown woman face down in a puddle of vomit on a sorority house lawn, or a family mistaking a lagoon of human waste for a hot spring, a steer munching on gory cow viscera, or a woman in a convertible killed in a head on collision with a semi are funny ideas, go for it. There’s a lot more where those came from. It’s not actively hateful like the worst R-rated comedies, but there’s a low-level grinding lazy nastiness that leaves a bad taste. Worst, though, is the way it’s just regurgitated garbage, a copy of a copy of a copy of an original that was merely half-decent to begin with.

Thing Called Love: ABOUT LAST NIGHT

As far as romantic dramas go, About Last Night isn’t anything you haven’t seen before. In this case, that turn of phrase is even more accurate than usual. It’s a loose adaptation of the 1986 romantic drama About Last Night…, which was itself a loose adaptation of David Mamet’s play Sexual Perversity in Chicago. So this material is hardly new or fresh. But in this particular version the screenplay is solid and the cast is appealing and it seems almost new and fresh all the same. It starts with a pair of separate but cleverly crosscut conversations. A goofball man (Kevin Hart) and a goofball woman (Regina Hall) explain to their patient best friends (Michael Ealy and Joy Bryant) how they first met each other. We soon discover that each pair is arriving at the same double date. Hart and Hall quickly get drunk and excuse themselves to go hook up, leaving their saner, more sensible friends behind to strike up a tentative romance. What follows traces a familiar narrative arc, but does so with enough pleasing details to remind that the typical romance narrative is familiar because once in a while it can still work.

Leslye Headland’s screenplay smartly uses the basic four characters, two couple structure to build funny juxtapositions into their concurrent romances. Ealy and Bryant, both steady and strong with deep eyes and deeply felt emotions, slowly settle into a cozy cohabitation. They’re both overcoming bad breakups in their distant pasts and discovering the pleasures of a fresh relationship. Meanwhile, over in the subplot, Hart and Hall, both wildly spontaneous and energetically exaggerated in every gesture, start strong and quickly flame out in a spectacularly sloppy break up that almost, but not quite, completely replaces their romantic passion with passionate vitriol. That Hart and Hall are the ones who think they have the best romantic advice for their friends is funny enough. That Ealy and Bryant indulge and even accept that advice is even funnier. It doesn’t grow into farce, but instead settles into a nice, smooth groove.  

What makes the film amiable and appealing is the screenplay’s allowance for gentle rhythms and some fine shading. Everyone here is more likable, sweeter and more realistic than I expected to find. These aren’t mere archetypical characters of the genre. Or rather, they aren’t only archetypical characters of the genre. Sure, these characters exist to a certain extent as broad cogs in the formula that will conspire to bring characters into a loving relationship, plant seeds of doubt and argument, and then break them up only to offer a glimmer of hope in the end. But Headland writes them dialogue that feels plausibly real, flirtatious and sharp in ways pleasing to the ear. They’re frank, sensual, and open without feeling dirty or exploitative. They’re real adults, not overgrown children or arrested adolescents. There’s a welcome sense of reality about them. These are characters who have lives and conversations, have feelings that impact the plot because of who they are, not just because of what the plot requires. 

The screenplay doesn’t pick sides and plays fair by everyone. When a couple grows apart and we have the token look at lives diverging, moving on alone, there’s not a sense that any one of them is any more wronged. It’s remarkably evenhanded and decent, refusing to devolve into reductive gender essentialism. It allows even goofballs to reveal complicated inner lives and different perspectives. (In doing so it allows Kevin Hart to give his best performance, in that it allows him moments that don’t need to be screamed or shrieked.) There’s a good scene in which one man admits to the other he’s jealous of him and then immediately tries to play it off as a joke. Another scene finds the women arguing about living arrangements, one snapping that she can’t put her life on hold just because her friend won’t have someone to complain about boyfriends with. I liked how willing the movie was to let the characters be themselves instead of always rushing off to the next plot point.

I had forgotten how enjoyable it could be watching attractive people fall in and out of love when the ensemble is given a solid foundation to work with. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but it’s nice to be reminded how effective formula can be when done well. Director Steve Pink moves things along swiftly, lingering long enough to appreciate his performers and the screenplay, but moving quickly enough so the stiffness of the formula doesn’t set in too badly. It’s a nice, amiable way to pass the time.

All They Want For Christmas: THE BEST MAN HOLIDAY

Even if you didn’t know Malcolm D. Lee’s The Best Man Holiday is a sequel to his 1999 ensemble comedy The Best Man, the sense of camaraderie and friendship in the cast would stand out. The first film was about a group of college friends reuniting, reconnecting, and reenacting old tensions and jealousies at the wedding of one of their own. This time, they’re reuniting for a Christmas celebration. One gets the sense that, though they’ve kept in touch, this is really the first time in 14 years that the whole group of them will be spending time together. They’ve got some catching up to do. Time allows Lee the opportunity to make a rare sequel that’s interested in how its characters have developed as people instead of simply recreating situations of the past.

Here, the bride (Monica Calhoun) and groom (Morris Chestnut) of the first film are happily married with a number of adorable small children. He’s become a star player for the New York Giants, a position that’s made him wealthy and famous. It’s they who invite the group to spend the holiday week at their mansion, remembering old times and making new memories. It’s a movie that leans on a sense of shared history that the entire ensemble sells wonderfully. The cast has relaxed comfort with each other, allowing their characters to find the easy rhythms, gentle needling, and still-simmering tensions that any group of old friends would have.

On the guest list for the holidays are a writer (Taye Diggs) and his pregnant wife (Sanaa Lathan), a TV news producer (Nia Long) and her new boyfriend (Eddie Cibrian), an education non-profit entrepreneur (Harold Perrineau) and his wife (Regina Hall), an unpredictable Real Housewife (Melissa De Sousa), and a rascal of a brand manager (Terrence Howard). They aren’t the struggling young adults they were all those years ago. Now, they have piles of bills, professional obstacles, children, and all manner of fully-grown obligations. Placing these characters in a big house and allow them to clash and connect in a variety of ways makes for good comedy and good drama. Lee’s screenplay is a silky smooth blend of gentle laughs, soft melodrama, and easy emotion, featuring nice moments big and small for each and every member of the cast.

As if aware that the holidays can be a hectic time, the movie figures it may as well reward Christmastime viewers with a little bit of everything. To suggest the overabundance of plot here, I’ll tell you that Chestnut is nearing retirement, and the rushing yards record, and Diggs, recently laid off from a gig teaching English and with a baby on the way, is desperate to sell a new book. Perrineau has just learned a big donor won’t be contributing his annual $2 million, an awful shortfall for a nonprofit. Long thinks her boyfriend’s Christmas gift to her just might be a proposal, De Sousa is starting to suspect her reality show stardom is interfering with her parenting skills or lack thereof, Lathan’s worried about her long-awaited pregnancy, and Howard just wants to crack jokes, drink, and slink away between rounds of pool and beers to sext in peace.

Add to that Lee’s commitment to tracing the still-lingering impact of events and revelations of the first film – past affairs, current hookups, and a certain semi-autobiographical novel that ruffled the ensemble’s feathers – and it’s clear the movie has a lot of ground to cover and subplots to juggle. The farcical setup gives way to enough meaningful life moments piling up in the back half that it could’ve powered a half-dozen Very Special Episodes of any given sitcom. It’s all too much, but somehow works anyway.

The supremely likable cast is full of talents who have aged into a greater sense of ease and comfort in their screen presences and with their scene partners. There’s affection radiating every which way on screen between characters and their performers that can’t help but drift out over the audience. It’s easy to enjoy their company. The conversations they have occasionally grow repetitive, but are always open to unexpected, sometimes R-rated, detours that even when they aren’t working are at least something. Even as the pleasant, undemanding, easygoing movie drifts into territory overwhelmingly overtly sentimental and tear jerking, the relaxed attitudes and easy banter only makes the sudden tough emotion crackle all the more.

There’s a striking moment in which Calhoun is struck by a sudden burst of emotion, moved beyond words, listening to two cute kids singing a Christmas hymn. The camera holds a medium shot as she leans closer, looms larger, her eyes wet, her lips forming the lyrics to softly sing along. In one little moment, the film communicates so much the importance of spending time with loved ones and the value of holiday tradition, it’s excusable that the overstuffed film rambles through so many big moments. It’s comically overflowing with incident by the end, but it doesn’t short change the characters or what they mean to each other.

Think For Yourself: THINK LIKE A MAN

It’s strange to suddenly realize we live in a world where based-on-a-self-help-book is a real subgenre of the romantic comedy. Sure, we had He’s Just Not That Into You back in 2009, but that felt like more of a fluke offshoot of the Love Actually school of ensemble rom-coms. (And, of course, there was Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask all the way back in 1972, but that’s really more of a collection of shorts and hardly a romantic comedy, so we may as well leave it out of this particular conversation). But with What to Expect When You’re Expecting coming out next month and Think Like a Man (based on Steve Harvey’s bestselling Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man) being the film in question here today, it’s become almost natural that a self help book be converted into a framework for an ensemble to fall in and out of love.

Harvey’s book is a relationship guide for women that claims to unlock the mysteries of the modern man’s mind. These so-called mysteries can then be used to find and win the heart of the types of men these women would prefer to be dating. In practice, the book’s worldview is one of rigid gender roles and insulting stereotypes for both men and women. And maybe it’s just me, but somehow the introduction of psychological warfare by way of hack standup routines seems to be at or near the opposite of romance and the foundation of a happy, healthy, adult relationship. The problem of Think Like a Man isn’t that it’s based off of a lame book, or even that it uses the book’s premises as cheap frames for its plotlines (introductory titles like “The Player” and “Mama’s Boy vs. Single Mom” spell out each couple’s “types” and central conflicts for us). The problem of this film is that it’s so often in the business of selling us the book.

Who should appear not once, not twice, but several times on TVs in the background or, even worse, talking right to the camera or in smug voice over? Steve Harvey as himself. Copies of the book are prominently displayed, bought, read, highlighted, and discussed in many a scene. An important plot twist develops around who knows who has been reading the book. At one point, during an otherwise reasonably entertaining conversation between two characters, one holds up a copy of the book, positioning the cover towards the camera almost as if she was plugging it on a talk show or revealing it as the next item on The Price is Right. Every time the book is hauled, literally or thematically, into the movie, it wrenches away interest from the characters by foregrounding the artificiality of it all.

Like any ensemble romantic comedy you’ve ever seen, this script by Keith Merryman and David A. Newman introduces a set of male characters and a set of female characters and proceeds to see them comically thrown together in separate but intertwining plots that click right along from the Meet Cutes to the false crisises, to the romantic revaluations and the eventual forgiving embraces. Director Tim Story jumps between plots and scenes with a bit of clumsiness that inhibits momentum, but sometimes it’s all pleasant enough, even, at times, vaguely amusing.  What makes this particular movie so pleasant is the cast. They’re so much better than the script requires that, when the formula fades away to some extent, it’s entirely their talent that causes it to do so.

As the men, we have dreamer Michael Ealy, man-child Jerry Ferrara, divorced Kevin Hart, mama’s boy Terrence Jenkins, and player Romany Malco. Hart and Malco are especially good here as the more explicitly comedic characters. They’ve been putting in good work, usually on the margins, in films and TV shows for years, so it’s nice to see them grab more of the spotlight. Where the cast really lights up is with the women. It’ll be tough for any other film this year to match it in the number underappreciated and underutilized actresses in the cast. Playing career women are Meagan Good, Taraji P. Henson, and Gabrielle Union, with Regina Hall as the single mom. They are so very good here that they serve to upend the film’s assumptions about the female mind. They’re lovely; they can be tough and vulnerable and are perfectly capable of being funny without becoming clowns. In the end, the film’s on their side.

Ideally, having a looser structure based around life lessons (of a sort) would allow the self-help rom-com to slip out of the boy-meets-girl, loses-girl, gets-girl grind, but here it just serves to multiply the predictability. Think Like a Man’s biggest problem is its hard sell approach to its hack ideas and stale gender role commentary. The movie lines up a pretty good cast and, when it can gain some real momentum away from Harvey’s book, it can be a fairly decent, if still underwhelming, picture. But that doesn’t happen often enough and by the end I was more disappointed than I thought I’d be. Flashes of promise make ultimate mediocrity hurt just a little bit more than usual.