Tag: 2 out of 4

Originally on this website I refused to review Horror movies, because I was a coward. That means once I got over it, I had a lot of backlog to catch up on. So if you have been seeing a lot more horror on average, now you know why! Because there is a lot of shit out there, and you need to know which of that shit is good and which of that shit is bad.

With a movie called Chernobyl Diaries, you might be able to figure out which side of the fence it falls on.

Or maybe it falls on top of the fence itself, and falls awkwardly on both sides.

This movie began with the song Alright by Supergrass. You’ve heard it, trust me. I was confused.

But lets run with it. Traveling around Europe can be exciting for people in their early 20s (and well, anyone). Chris (Jesse McCartney) and his girlfriend Natalie (Olivia Dudley) and third friend Amanda (Devin Kelley) are running around Europe, being young and free. They stop in Kiev to visit Chris’ brother, Paul (Jonathan Sadowski), and he likes to live life on the edge.

Paul hears about this “extreme tour” of Pripyat, the abandoned company town which sits in the shadow of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Oh snap. It would be lead by tough guy Uri (Dimitri Diatchenko), with another couple (Nathan Phillips, Ingrid Bolso Berdal) joining them.

But when they get there, they are stopped by the Ukranian military. For some reason, they cannot go into the abandoned city today. Huh. Too bad. What? They will sneak in. Good idea. It is pretty cool place, very eerie. But when the van doesn’t start before dusk when they try to leave, they get nervous. Apparently someone has sabotaged their vehicle. Now they are stranded in an abandon city. Oh boy, what could go wrong?

“Who’s there? Is that you, Fred? Fred, stop being weird.”

I wonder what the survivors of the Chernobyl explosion feel about this movie. Actually, no, I don’t care. If we had to worry about offending people before we made movies, a lot of movies wouldn’t get made. I can’t have that happening.

Dumb kids were being dumb in this movie, and the timing felt off. Their second day in the city seemed incredibly short, I am not sure why it took them so long to do the various things.

But at the same time, making this movie with what they worked at, it was surprisingly okay. There was a variety into the deaths of these poor saps. They weren’t just disappearing off the side of the camera, which well, some did. The ending was a bit expected, but still glad they went that route. It unfortunately opens up room for more of these, but I don’t want to see another one.

You know what? This movie had a bear. A big fucking bear in it. I love bears. Bears should be in more movies. It is not a complete pile of shit. How could it be, it has a bear!

2 out of 4.

The first time I saw the trailer for Now You See Me, I got all sorts of excited. A movie with magic and illusions? Heck yeah! It has been seven years since we really had movies on the subject, when we were blessed with The Prestige and The Illusionist, both of which were quite enjoyable.

Oh. I meant good movies about magicians. Sorry. I tend to forget about The Incredible Burt Wonderstone already (and that was in March!).

Look at this gaggle of fucks right here. Basically every star in this movie! Wait…

To start the film, we are introduced to four different street magicians. Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), the fast talking kind of a dick magician, McKinney (Woody Harrelson), the formerly big mentalist, Henley (Isla Fisher), the former assistant turned pro, and Jack Wilder (Dave Franco), the thieving tricky magician. They are all invited to a secret gathering, where they find blue prints to pull off great magical feats. A year later, they are calling themselves The Four Horsemen and headlining in Las Vegas and around the world!

Their new benefactor is Arthur Tressler (Michael Caine), a big big millionaire, and they just used a magic trick to rob a bank in Paris. Huh? What?

Yep. But the FBI and lead detective Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo) are in a pickle. Can they arrest them for a magic trick, with no real evidence? Well, no evidence unless they assume magic is real. The answer is no. Even with Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman), an ex-magician who has a web-series explaining and spoiling other magician’s secrets, they don’t have enough to actually put them away.

Rhodes and his new partner from Interpol (Melanie Laurent) have to follow the four horsemen across America, as their tricks get more and more daring, and steal from more and more powerful sources. But are they doing these tricks alone, or is there a Fifth Horsemen secretly pulling the strings? Also featuring Michael Kelly as an FBI agent. I feel bad for not including him.

In a previous version of this review, I used famous character names instead of actor names for the plot description (like Mark Zuckerberg, or The Hulk) but Dave Franco kind of ruined that. No one really knows who he is.

Why are you so befuddled Ruffalo? Surprised I decided to leave Eisenberg out of the pictures?The more I think about the ending to Now You See Me, the more I get angry at inconsistencies. That is what I get for thinking about a movie afterwards I guess. But alas, my burden to carry as a reviewer.

In a movie like this, there will be red herrings, because they know you are trying to guess the ending the entire time. After all, clearly the fifth horseman will be someone in the movie, not some random stranger popping up at the end! But when the reveal happens it just doesn’t seem to make much since the harder you look at the film.

The movie spends a decent amount of time focusing on explaining the tricks, thanks to Freeman’s character, but at the same time, there are things done only toby the power of CGI that kind of take the mysticism out of it. We are left wondering if magic is actually real in this movie, or if it is all explainable like the normal real world. Honestly, by the end, I am still not sure.

At the same time, it still was a bit entertaining. I think Woody Harrelson was my favorite player in the movie, by far. Which is great, because I finally saw Rampart recently and didn’t have a good time doing it. As the mentalist, he was pretty funny. Ruffalo was okay as the main cop character, but definitely not the type of role he is used to. After all, aside from The Avengers and this film, every role he has had has basically been in an indie movie.

Now You See Me did a good job of playing with our mind, giving every possible misdirection in the book. But it in no way will stand up to the previous mentioned magic films in a year or two. However, it is still at least a little bit cool.

2 out of 4

Whew, this might be one of the longer reviews I have put off writing. After I saw Pawn, I meant to write it later that night. Then I probably wandered off and fell into a movie coma.

Then I kept watching more and more movies, so although Pawn was on my list to write I kept just picking different movies to write about instead.

Well, eventually laziness catches up to all of us. Not to mention making sure I write it before I forget basically everything.

Hover over this image. What do you see? You see that I am really fucking clever.

Basically, Pawn tries to turn a simple robbery into a complicated game of cat and mouse. Like Derrick (Michael Chiklis) is British. That on its own is pretty complicated. He has a group of thugs, and for whatever reason they are slowly robbing a night time diner. They came in early, but the safe is time sensitive so it will only open at a certain time every night. Shit. Looks like they just have to play it cool.

Hard to do that when customers are frightened, and random cops (Forest Whitaker) come strolling in. There is also Nick (Sean Faris), who is on parole, and looking to get his life back on track for his wife (Nikki Reed) and kid. Last thing he wants to do is get mixed up in any wrong doing. We also have Charlie (Stephen Lang), the owner who is getting far too old for this shit.

And who can forget fucking Ray Liotta? Ray Liotta is some sort of evil guy, but just who he is working for is the bigger question.

Basically, everyone is an asshole, and everyone might have secret motives for either being there that night, or what they are out to get. There are some things far more important than money.

Like good old fashioned bromance.

Well, in movie terms, this one has plenty of twists and turns, but not enough to make you annoyed. Again, everyone seems to be playing a game, except for our hero Nick (good name), who is unfortunately caught up in this. Doesn’t help that his brother works in Internal Affairs. Lot of cops hate those guys. Lot of crooked cops in this town too.

I actually enjoyed parts of this movie for what it was, but overall it is just an average movie. Chiklis had a pretty bad British accent. The ending is hard to remember, mostly because it seemed really silly. Similarly, not all of the plot twists made complete sense.

I do think this film could have used more chess references though.

2 out of 4.

After Fast Five premiered, there was a lot of talk about the future of the franchise thanks to the scene in the credits. It left many people confused. How could Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) be alive, when she clearly died in The Fast and The Furious?

We will get to that later. More importantly, the time line of the films became more clear.

They mentioned that Fast & Furious 6 (Trailer) would follow 5, and part 7 would be set AFTER Tokyo Drift. Basically, films 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6 of the series are in the correct order, and 3 is set after 6, but before 7. They also went through a little bit of development hell, where they were going to break 6 into two parts, but thankfully went back to just one film. Either way, the questions you have at the end of 6 will be answered next summer when part 7 comes out.

I don’t give a fuck about any of that, because HOLY SHIT A TANK! Long story short, there is a highly tactical gang of drivers out there in Europe, who are trying to assemble a device that can shut down an entire city for 24 hours. That is a pretty dangerous weapon and could kill a lot of people. Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) and his new partner Riley (Gina Carano) know the only people who can help them out are a group of lesser international criminals on the run from the law.

Dom (Vin Diesel) and Brian (Paul Walker) obviously refuse to help, but when Hobbs shows pictures of Letty, his love who they thought died years ago, they assemble the team (Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Sung Kang, and Gal Gadot) to find out how this picture exists and if she is really alive. Saving the world isn’t on their mind, just finding the girl.

But with Shaw (Luke Evans) being a criminal master mind, always a few steps ahead of the authorities, can their rag tag group even follow in their exhaust fumes?

Of course the women have to fight each other. Gender equality people, let’s see some. Fast & Furious 6 is being lauded as one of the best films in the franchise, and action movies in general. I will give the movie that. There is action throughout the movie, from car chases, to scenes completely void of cars. It doesn’t apologize for anything in the film, and goes at completely ridiculous lengths for an explosion or two.

But personally, it completely changes the genre of the film, which grinds my gears the most.

To me, everyone felt like a super hero in this film. There are TONS of hand to hand combat scenes between the two groups, and it felt like watching a live action Dragon Ball movie. Ridiculous feats of strength and long battles where neither side got hurt, when most of these people are just retired car racers. It bugged me to no end that they all basically became invincible just for the sake of a bigger action movie.

On top of that, I don’t think it flowed well. Almost every scene I felt confused due to the plot of the movie. The heroes were constantly doing nonsensical things. Nonsensical to their character and to a normal human being. They wedged a street race into the movie that plot wise didn’t make sense (nor did anything out of that London woman’s mouth before the race). At one point four or five of the bad guys get arrested and end up making their escape, yet one of the group is no longer seen in the movie. I guess they just decided to write him out of the movie.

The climatic plane ending is ruined for me thanks to it apparently being the longest run way known to man, making the ridiculousness too much to bare. It also features an Amnesia plot line, which I feel is one of the laziest plot developments you can ever come up with.

Yes, if you changed the movie to be something completely set apart from the Fast & Furious universe, I would probably enjoy the movie more. But we have five movies that are grounded (mostly) in reality, a shift in genre I can’t get over. It is breaks all the rules of the series, despite trying its hardest to include the previous five films. If it was an original movie (and better acting), I might have loved it.

2 out of 4.

The Hangover series is a bit of an enigma. Here is why!

The original is about four men on a bachelor party in Las Vegas, where they all black out, one goes missing, and they have to retrace their steps through the wildest night of their lives before the wedding. So what’d the sequel do? The Hangover Part II gave us another wedding, another night of blacked our memories and regrets, but in Thailand. Like most sequels, in contained the same theme and a similar plot. After all, it is called The Hangover and is about being hungover, and it is not called “Some Guys Get Into Shenanigans!” I don’t know if people complained about the similarities between Die Hard and Die Hard 2.

But for whatever reason, audiences hated it and voiced their displeasure. Which is why we now have The Hangover Part III! (Trailer) Learning from their mistakes, we now have a movie about a few guys getting into shenanigans and no hangovers.

Classic elevator scenes are classic. Those sheets are suggestive as fuck.

A few years after Part II, Alan (Zach Galifianakis) is still a madman. He is off his medication and causing accidents, overly stressing his father (Jeffrey Tambor) and giving him a fatal heart attack.

Which is why his friends decide to give him an intervention. Doug (Justin Bartha), Stu (Ed Helms), and Phil (Bradley Cooper) convince him to drive down to the rehab center to get his life back on track! But along the way, they are hijacked by Marshall (John Goodman), a drug dealer and international criminal, who claims Chow (Ken Jeong) stole $21 Million in gold bars from him.

Of course the only person to be in contact with Chow since Thailand is Alan. So he kidnaps Doug, and they have three days to find Chow and his money, or Doug dies. Swell!

This film also brings back Mike Epps as “Black Doug”, Heather Graham as Jade, and introduces Melissa McCarthy as a pawn shop owner.

Yep, the whole gang is represented in this poster. Wait…

I think I am going to put this blame on the writers. In terms of plot, this Hangover actually tells a decent story. There is betrayal, redemption, and a group of guys that can’t fix their larger than life problems. But instead of focusing on the entire group, it is almost a if Stu and Phil get pushed out of the way for the Alan and Chow show.

Alan is an annoying character, which Zach G. tends to to play a lot (With mixed results). He is the type of character that is good for a comedy, but shouldn’t be the main focus. Chow was also a secondary character, but  it feels like he has more lines than even Stu, who in turn is just a punching bag for Alan this movie.

The writers intended this to be a redemption movie for Alan, and thus  gave him the leading role. After all, everyone else has settled down besides his character, so this is just his turn to settle to end the series. But it feels very forced. The film on the whole has less humor than the previous two, focusing more on the intense plot lines. In fact, the scaffolding scene from the trailer made me jump from my feet in fright. Not that the seriousness was a bad thing, but it is framed as a comedy and not an adventure/action film.

I know it is a strange thing to blame the writers yet talk highly of the plot.I wish they were able to have the same overall storyline, without cramming two (Arguably) secondary characters down our throat. It shouldn’t be hard to give Bradley Cooper or Ed Helms bigger roles in the film. They felt like replaceable cast members, which is unacceptable.

That being said, Part III wasn’t horrible, it just wasn’t amazing either.

2 out of 4.

I was very excited when I first saw the trailer for Epic. The music is perfect, not a lot is spoiled, it looks beautiful, and looks like a great new franchise.

You know what I don’t like? The title. You know how hard it is to look up things about Epic? Don’t just search the title, you will get dumb internet images. “Epic Movie” is out, because of a bad movie having that exact same name. I had to resort to searching for “Epic <character/actor name” to get anything close to finding suitable images or posts. Come on people, think about the ease of finding your movie before you name it. Unfortunately, it was also made by Blue Sky Productions, who haven’t really made anything I really loved, their last effort being Ice Age 4: Continental Drift.

Just look at how sexy those birds are. Mmmmhmm.

This movie begins with death! Death before the film takes place (this is a PG movie). MK (Amanda Seyfried) is en route to her fathers house in the middle of the woods. She is almost 18, but her mother just died, and so she has to go live with her dad, who is basically a stranger to her. You see, Professor Bomba (Jason Sudeikis) believes there is a hidden ecosystem in these woods, hidden from human eyes. They react on a faster plane, like flies, so humans can’t really see them because they are always moving so…fast. Yeah, he went crazy and his wife left him. Happens all the time.

But holy tiny men, Bomba is right! In fact, it is a special day, the Summer Solstice on the same night as the Full Moon! Time for the Queen (Beyonce Knowles) to pick a new heir for the next 100 years. After all, only the queen can restore life to the forest if the evil Mandrake (Christoph Waltz) of the Boggarts (swamp/decay creatures) come to mess things up.

The leaf men won’t let that happen! Ronin (Colin Farrell) has sworn to protect her, but young Nod (Josh Hutcherson) is making things difficult by quitting. After some bad things happen, MK finds herself in the woods and magically gets shrunk down to their size. Now she is in the middle of a forest civil war, with the threat of 100 years of swamps on the horizon.

Of course, this could all be some sort of PTSD after her mom’s death for all we know. Chris O’Dowd and Aziz Ansari play a snail and slug, respectfully, Pitbull a frog, and Steven Tyler a glowworm.

“No shell over here baby, I’m a slug” – Aziz. Possibly my new favorite line ever, and I don’t know why.

Epic is loosely based on the children’s book (that no one has heard of), The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs. Basically, it took the character ideas, and made an original story. The plot itself isn’t the most exciting or original, and was filled with certain plot holes that made me shutter.

But it’s pretty, though.

One of my biggest complaints is inconsistencies in a movie. In this case, what is the real difference between a tiny human, a plant/animal human hybrid, and an actual plant or animal.

It’d be simple if all animals and plants could talk and be human-like in this movie, but we have frogs and snails that can talk perfectly, living out their lives and jobs, right next to birds who are just 100% animal, no voice. We have flowers that are just flowers, right next to some flowers that run around, gossip, and have arms and legs. Where is the balance? How does this work?

With the leaf men, they aren’t leaves at all. They are basically tiny humans, with just leaf armor as clothing. Nothing else in the forest outside of the queen appears to be a tiny human, so I found it all confusing.

But it’s pretty, though.

Epic ended up being just an average film, not living up to its (poor) title. If you ignore how confusing the world ends up being, it is a cute tale that is outrageously incredible to look at.

“Hey, it’s a kids movie, stop thinking so deeply about the world!”. No, that is a bad excuse, and leads to movies like Cars 2.

2 out of 4

The Hunter came out almost a year ago, last July. I am pretty sure I got it sometime around then too. Whoops. One of those random gains that you forget about for apparently 10 or so months.

Let’s make this a metaphor about life. I just won’t explain that metaphor, to complete this very bad intro to a review.

Hopefully shitty enough to cause a bar fight. Or sexy enough. Shit, what causes bar fights again?

Red Leaf is a military biotech company. Yeah, didn’t you know that those were a thing? Because they totally are! Military. Biotech. Some sort of crazy weapon based thing. Well, they have reports that the Tasmanian Tiger has been spotted recently in Tasmania. Makes sense. Unless you realize that that they have been extinct since 1963! Oh hooray, a breakthrough for the species! Maybe they can breed them back to a populated state!

Wait. Hmm. Red Leaf isn’t a fan of that. In fact, they hire The Hunter (Willem Dafoe) to head to Tasmania, capture the tiger, extract its DNA and kill any other tigers he is able to find. Holy shit, that’s the opposite of saving them! It turns out they might have some paralyzing venom in their bite, and they want to weaponize the fuck out of it, charming. They also want no one else to get a hold of it. Evil!

He heads to Tasmania, pretending to be a Biology researcher, and stays at a local cabin. Lucy (Frances O’Connor) is drugged up on pain meds, despite having two children. Her husband died, he was a wildlife protection guy. Hah.

Either way, The Hunter goes into the wild 12 days at a time, setting traps, looking for the Tiger and then returns to the cabin. He begins to like the kids, fix their home life, and even the mom. They almost make a quaint little family. At the same time he has to deal with local battles between the environmentalists and the loggers, who get violent over each other.

Will the Hunter find the tiger and carry out the deed? Or will he give in to the pressures of other groups. After all, if he refuses, they will probably just keep sending people to do the job until it gets done. Sam Neill is also in this movie as random helpful neighbor guy/guide.

Ah, they got a picture of everyone who saw The Hunter on opening night.

The cool thing about The Hunter is that if you watch it, you are treated to some kick ass Tasmanian scenery. It is filmed entirely in the country, so it gives it some layers of authenticity. There are also people there who claim to see the Tigers, but have no real substantial proof, so it is based on local legends. If you like Willem Dafoe, you get a lot of him in the movie. Not shirtless or anything. Just it is mostly him being a bad ass (or pseudo badass).

However, the movie does move pretty slow. On top of that, even though the ending was unexpected, I didn’t like what it gave me. It all seemed completely out of left field, and probably not the best course of action to end it. They had the balls to end it that way, but I didn’t find the character change to be believable.

You know what that means? Average! Hooray. I’m bored.

2 out of 4.

I have been told by one of my friends that Netflix has been pushing Bachelorette on them pretty strongly over their last few movies. No matter the movie. Now, I am not going to make the claim that they will ignore their “If you like this, you might like x?” formula sometimes for advertisements, but the evidence seems pretty strong.

For shame, Netflix. But I took it overall as a request to see the movie myself, you know, like I tend to do, and decide if its worth all this Netflix hype. Maybe they are just making up for its lack of advertisements elsewhere? After all, pretty impressive cast. Kind of. But I only heard about it after it hit video, so clearly people didn’t care about hyping it in the slightest.

If you saw the cast, you did not guess the bride to be correctly.

Becky (Rebel Wilson) is getting married, yay! This actually kind of pisses of Regan (Kirsten Dunst), her best friend. How could her “Fat friend” find happiness in marriage before her? What the heck?! Either way, she will be her maid of honor and help her plan a kick ass wedding, but they still need their two best friends from college, Gena (Lizzy Caplan) and Katie (Isla Fisher).

To help with the recap, we have Becky the Happy, Regan the uptight and pompous, Katie the drunk and cokefiend, and Gena the sarcastic and apathetic. Great, different personalities, and not one of which is the “slut” (arguable, when Katie is drunk, but shh).

Well, things get dicey at the bachelorette party, when the stripper (Andrew Rannells) calls Becky a pigface, a mean nickname in high school. Shit, are her friends actually still mean bitches who can’t be nice for once? Things start getting out of hand, including a ripped up wedding dress. This leads the remaining trio to go out to try and fix all the problems the night before the nuptials.

It also features Adam Scott, Hayes MacArthur, Kyle Bornheimer, and James Marsden! They play either the groom, exes who are still in love, or new people who just want to get laid. I will let you figure out who goes with who.

Pictured, the female version of The Hangover. It would be Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, and Bradley Cooper personality wise.

Well, this movie is a little bit bleak. I mean that in the best way possible. All three of the main girls have unlikable virtues associated with them, and they are all pretty callous, but that makes the film more exciting for me. Bad people, being bad. They are trying to make a harder comedy, but with women! Sure, maybe I should be worried that movies trying to do this tend to be about weddings, because apparently that is the only thing women do. I will let someone trained in sociology to figure out the ramifications about that.

It wasn’t an insanely funny movie by any means, but at least it was a bit interesting. I am mostly annoyed by the ending, in which they attempted to redeem every character and wrap up their plot lines in happy endings.

Boo. The entire movie was about unhappy people. I wanted more unhappy endings. Bring on the sad people!

2 out of 4.

You know who we need more in our lives? Hugh Laurie. That is who you were going to say, right? After all, House M.D. ended a year ago, and he hasn’t been in many movies recently, outside of voice work. It is almost not fair!

Which is why when I heard about The Oranges I jumped immediately to the nearest rental place to give a go. I also immediately recognize people from Arrested Development, Gossip Girl, The O.C., The West Wing, and The Big C. That is a lot of show people in this movie!

Why so gloomy Alia? You upset that you don’t get cover treatment despite being the narrator? I understand those feels.

In New Jersey, we have two families, The Ostroffs and The Wallings (on Orange Drive!). They have lived across the street for some time, and their families are best of friends. David (Laurie) and Paige Walling (Catherine Keener), with their children Vanessa (Alia Shawket) and Toby (Adam Brody). Toby is successful and moved out, Vanessa is not yet successful and still living at home. She is also the narrator! At least she has that going for her.

Across the street are Carol (Allison Janney) and Terry Ostroff (Oliver Platt), the latter kind of obsessed with his best friend David. They have one daughter, Nina (Leighton Meester), who hasn’t been home in five years, off at college and partying everywhere. But one Thanksgiving, she returns, after having recently broken up with her long term boyfriend.

Well, instead of hooking up with Toby, like her mom strives hard for, she falls into someone else’s lab. David Walling! (Again, Hugh Laurie, the neighbor dad). Heyyy, that’s weird.

Shit quickly hits the fan clearly, once everyone finds out what is happening. Marriages get ruined, people hate each other, and Vanessa just feels incredibly awkward.

Yeah, so basically this is good clean inter-family fun.

I like that the relationship wasn’t some overly sexualized thing Sure, big age difference, known each other for over 20 years, many other issues, but it felt like they actually might have cared for each other.

Buuuuut outside of that, I thought the movie missed the mark completely. Even though the two characters just want to be happy, the movie goes about it in such a strange way, I don’t find myself caring about any of the characters. I also thought the ending was pretty bad, not a fan of really any of the conclusions.

It just isn’t that funny. Hard to say anything else about it. Hugh Laurie was okay. However, the movie is skippable.

2 out of 4.

This is not a Tyler Perry Movie!

It is Tyler Perry Presents. That means he didn’t do anything but provide funding or distribution. Just like how The Man With The Iron Fists was “Quentin Tarantino Presents…” and not his own movie.

I think I called it a Tyler Perry movie in my review of Temptation, but that was my bad. His name is still associated with it though. So my rant there still holds!

Before I make a fool out of myself further, lets look at Peeples, aka, the black Meet The Parents.

Two me, two things pop out making this clearly not Meet The Parents. Meeting parents can be tough. Especially if you are Wade Walker (Craig Robinson) and you make your living by singing to small groups of children. He has been in a relationship with Grace (Kerry Washington) for over a year now, and wants to propose, but he hasn’t even met her family. Not for lack of trying, she just won’t let him.

But when she goes home for a weekend, he decides to crash the party thanks to the advice of his brother (Malcolm Barrett), to meet the family and propose on the spot. It couldn’t go wrong!

Even if her dad was federal court judge (David Alan Grier) and her mom a famous diva (S. Epatha Merkerson).

Obviously, her dad doesn’t approve of him, so he will have to spend the entire weekend working on gaining their approval, while also finding out that her family has many secrets of their own. Also featuring Tyler James Williams (From Go On) as her younger brother, Kali Hawk as her sister, and Kimrie Lewis-Davis as her sister’s “Friend”.

This is the general reaction to black people over lesbians, I hear. Wouldn’t you know it, this movie wasn’t a complete piece of shit. Hooray!

In fact, performances by most of the cast were excellent. David Alan Grier hasn’t been in a leading role like this in awhile, and not only has he aged well, but he also hasn’t lost his touch. S. Epatha Merkerson gave a great impression as someone always on pharmaceuticals. Kerry Washington is normally very serious, but was great in a role having to go back and forth between childish and”normal.”

Craig Robinson, on the other hand, was exactly like he normally is. Which is fine! Just saying, don’t expect a spectacularly acted performance by Craig, but his normal funny self.

For those wondering, the title Peeples comes from the families last name, “The Peeples”, so you will get to hear that word over and over again.

Although it is predictable, I would say Peeples has a lot of heart in it, and some genuine moments. There are at least three song and dance scenes as well, including a very cute number to end the movie with.

2 out of 4.