I agree completely with this take. There could be something to this script if they spent some time working on it. The "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" in the climate of the last couple of years could be really interesting/funny if done well. This...was not. But like you said I still laughed at a good number of things.TCTTS said:
This is one of the most weirdly and incompetently paced/structured movies ever, with next to no tangible stakes, which features maybe the worst green screen shot I've ever seen, and for some reason really bad special effects (?), along with so many janky establishing drone shots, not to mention a script that feels like a first and only draft, written and directed by someone who's never done either of those things before.
And yet… I still laughed.
Quite a bit, actually. At least during the first half. I just really like Jonah Hill's sense of humor, and I guess it's been a while since I've seen him in a straight up comedy. Don't get me wrong, it's a truly terrible movie, but one I'm not at all mad I watched.
That said... Ezra WAS a ****ing idiot, and Eddie Murphy's character was 100% right to think he was a piece of **** who didn't deserve his daughter. For some reason, Ezra QUIT HIS JOB at literally the same moment he and his girlfriend decided to BUY A HOUSE together. In LOS ANGELES. Then, when he KNEW his father-in-law-to-be was attending his bachelor party, Ezra STILL decided to go to a strip club??? WITH his cokehead friends??? That might be the dumbest, most unbelievable thing I've seen in a movie in the last ten years. Never mind the fact that I wouldn't trust a single person who did coke or surrounded himself with close, cokehead friends. I was legit mad when Murphy changed his mind about Ezra, simply because the script needed him to. Man, that was bad.
Side question and not to derail totally, but there's been more movies recently with really bad green screen shots - like a lot of the movie seems like really bad green screen shots. Is that just all because of filming with covid? Trying to lower the budget somehow in ways that you didn't see a couple of years ago? Curious why that seems to be more common here recently. Or maybe it just didn't bother me before and it's always been a thing?