Film Review — You People
★☆☆☆☆ Eddie Murphy and Julia-Louis Dreyfus are wasted in a painfully unfunny cringefest
A new interracial couple’s relationship is tested when their two families meet and begin to clash over their differences.
If ever there was a more appropriate use for Jonah Hill’s famous cut-it-out gesture, immortalised in GIF form, this would be it. Directed by Kenya Barris, creator of black·ish, and co-written in collaboration with Hill, You People is a shocking misfire, an edgy but limp social satire that will endure across 2023 as a sure-fire contender for the worst film of the year.
A quasi-reimagining of the 1967 romantic comedy Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, the film is strongest early on when focused on the blossoming relationship between Hill and Lauren London, an organic pairing that effortlessly exudes charm and likability.
But this good feeling is quickly lost, replaced with a series of hostile and increasingly cringe-inducing exchanges between their families, an assortment of characters who scarcely resemble people, rather the most ill-informed and casually bigoted caricatures I only thought existed on Twitter.
The film’s biggest problem, however — and this is quite something considering its unchecked anti-semitism and Jonah Hill, with his midlife crisis blonde hair, looking like a sunburnt tomato and dressed in designer gear that even Billie Eilish would consider too garish — is that it’s excruciatingly unfunny.
Quite how a film featuring Hill and a Saturday Night Live reunion of legendary funnies Eddie Murphy and Julia-Louis Dreyfus could be so devoid of anything resembling even the faintest chuckle is mind-boggling. Not even a brief cameo from Mike Epps can save this comedic void.
You People is the cinematic equivalent of a shart on a packed bus. A staggeringly ineffective exercise in relentless humourless quipping, filled with Drake jokes that weren’t funny five years ago. It looks like the kind of film a bargain bin, Logan Paul-wannabe editor would throw together on a cocaine and Prime-fuelled rampage, and comes with a denouement delivered with all the conviction and believability of a Dhar Mann life lesson on YouTube.
A stunning waste of a fantastic cast, and a golden opportunity to add something positive to a difficult discourse, a depressing divide this film has zero interest in reconciling.
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