Big Mama’s House 2
Martin Lawrence, Zachary Levi, Emily Procter
With the Super Bowl looming in the next few weeks, here is a little game to make the event a little more interesting to you. As you watch the game, remember that each side has 11 men on offense and 11 men on defense, that’s 44 players. One out of 40 men in America likes to wear women’s clothing, given statistics, which one do you think it is? Or the next time you turn on C-Span, there are 100 Senators. Odds say that it is probable that 2 or 3 of them like the feeling of silk against their skin. Try picking out the ones that like putting their wife’s cocktail dress on in the evenings for fun? We have had 43 Presidents of the United States. I would hate to guess which one gave his Inaugural Address in a pushup bra and panties. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover must have been a sight in a summer dress and pumps. Governor of New York Edward Hyde must have cut a dashing figure in an evening gown. It is claimed that he even wore a nice frock to his wife’s funeral. Pope Paul II got the nickname Our Lady of Pity for his cross-dressing. A couple members of George Custer’s Seventh Cavalry found out that the west was a little more wild than they thought after they married the fort’s laundry woman. It was later discovered on her death that she was a dude. One of the most popular plays in Broadway history, M. Butterfly, is based on a real life love affair between a French diplomat and a male opera singer who masqueraded as a woman. David Bowie, Elton John, Eddie Izzard, Liberace, Little Richard, Tiny Tim, Richard Simmons, John Waters, and Ed Wood made their careers out of gender bending. Long before Uncle Milty delighted television audiences, dating back to the silent era and Fatty Arbuckle, Americans have delighted in watching a man in drag. Remember the good old days, back in the 1950s when Hollywood respected family values, back when Cary Grant donned a dress in I Was a Mail Order Bride and Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis helped Some Like It Hot get some Oscar nominations by dressing like chicks. All American Tom Hanks got his first big break by playing the cross-dressing Kip “Buffy” Wilson in Bosom Buddies. Most of America tuned in each week to find out what outfit Cpl. Maxwell Klinger would be wearing on M*A*S*H each week. I remember going with my Luther League to watch Dustin Hoffman prance around in a red dress as Michael Dorsey/Dorothy Michaels in Tootsie. Over the years, Americans have turned out in grooves to watch actors like Robin Williams, Michael Caine, Anthony Perkins, Tim Curry, Gene Hackman, Nathan Lane, Wesley Snipes, Patrick Swayze, and John Lithgow has all worn wigs and makeup. It is almost a shorter list to name actors who have not worn foam rubber and a pushup bra.
I have given you all this information because it is a joke that is not funny and the last time seeing a guy in drag was humorous was the days of Milton Berle and Billy Wilder. It was a one trick joke that long ago put a lampshade on its head and wore out its welcome. It can be accidentally funny like when baseball pitcher Dave Stewart, who got caught with a cross-dressing hooker, claimed another major leaguer threw like a girl, which led the recipient of Stewart’s barb to proclaim, “Well, he ought to know.” Or maybe it was when funny man Eddie Murphy claimed ignorance after got pulled over by police when the person in the passenger seat was a dude in a dress. (A little helpful hint, Eddie, it is called an Adam’s apple for a reason.) It was not funny six years ago, when Martin Lawrence as FBI agent Malcolm Turner put on a fat suit, wig, and dress, went undercover as Big Mama, and conned $117.5 million out of the American public. A razor-like tongue, the standup comedian was dangerous and cutting edge. He had been barred from ever hosting Saturday Night Live again, arrested for carrying a loaded gun, and even sued by his sitcom co-star, Tisha Campbell (My Wife and Kids), for sexual harassment. He seemed destined to either be the next Eddie Murphy (Beverly Hills Cop, Trading Places, 48 Hrs.) or to be found dead in some dirty motel room with a needle sticking out of his arm. Who knew that it would be the latter Murphy, the Dr. Doolittle, Daddy Day Care, Nutty Professor, I make awful films because they pay me a load of cash Murphy he would become. Since 2000, Lawrence has gotten huge sums of money (ranging from $13 million to $20 million a film) to make low rent comedies that have stunk worse than an outhouse at a chili eating contest. Except for the sequel to Bad Boys, Lawrence proved to be the Droopy Dog of the box office netting between $16 million and $36 million for each of his films. What is a he-man to do? Dress, please. For $20 million, and the chance to have several more chances for such paydays, there is not a man alive who would not turn to his girlfriend and say, “Honey, does my butt look big in this frock?”
The real question is not why Lawrence did the film, but why the studio thought that after half a decade that the American people could not wait for a sequel to a film that left audiences feeling like a 2-year-old who had just touched a hot stove. Haven’t they heard of Analysis That? Lara Croft 2? The Whole Ten Yards? Charlie’s Angels 2? With the success of Tyler Perry’s Madea Simmons franchise (the most famous being Diary of a Mad Black Woman), Hollywood has never met a bad idea it did not like. Borrowing a page from the Butterfly McQueen school of acting, Malcolm Turner is forced to become Big Mama again to go undercover as a nanny for 3 children in a dysfunctional clan for the sake of national security. Giving more than a sentence to the plot of this god awful piece of garbage is too much. I would rather sit through George W. Bush trying to find a verb in the sentence he just uttered than sit through this film again. I would rather judge a wet t-shirt contest in a nursing home that witness one more frame of Big Mama. I would rather shave with a cheese grader than sit through another Malcolm Turner movie. I would rather suffer a slow death of paper cuts than write one more word about this movie. I would like to propose that once a year we have Stephen Fetchit weekend at the local Cineplex. We take all the movies were black actors play gangsters, rappers, hip hoppers, and wife beaters, along with every comedy that mentions malt liquor, bling bling, and other racial stereotypes, and show them all on one weekend, one weekend of Snoop Dog, Madea, and the lesser members of the Wayans family. Get all of our nation’s racism out in one big KKK film festival, because I am tired of it, just tired of it.
When I was in 2nd grade, long after the civil rights movement, well above the Mason-Dixon line, my school system smeared burnt cork on the faces of their blonde-haired, blue-eyed children and we had a big old minstrel show for Christmas. (I have the pictures for anyone who does not believe it.) “I’s be’n workin’ on the railroa’…” I remember looking out at the audience of smiling parents and grandparents, and realizing that no one else thought it was wrong. No one was going to get up and leave in a huff. There would be no letters to the newspaper. No teacher was going to lose a job. In the midst of a crowded auditorium, I stopped singing and never felt so lonely. This is 2006, not 1806. A guy in a dress stopped being funny long ago and so is racism.
Verdict: Will Be On My 2006 Worst of List