Reviews

Not sure where to begin with this stinker from Kenya Barris. There are a few cute lines in every episode, and I admittedly have laughed a couple of times. The supporting cast is good. Production values are good, period, and especially good for BET, which has been churning out a surfeit of ratchet, low-effort, low-budget garbage.

That's where the good news ends.

1. The actor portraying the main character is not good. The supporting cast is talented, so the contrast emphasizes her limitations. And the character is not sympathetic: she's so arrogant and entitled that she can't accept being ghosted by a Tinder date, so she literally stalks him, and that's how she stumbles on a mystery.

2. The show is trying to do too much. It's a comedy. And a drama. And a mystery. And an erotic thriller. Because the writers can't decide what it is, it's very uneven 3. The plot is absurd (the middle school teacher with no law enforcement background runs the streets of Detroit solving a cold case), the cast is too big, most of the subplots/B stories are unnecessary distractions, and several supporting characters are stock stereotypes straight out of central casting, especially the Sassy Gay Best Friend.

4. Continuity/editing is an issue. I feel like there was a rewrite and no one went through the script afterwards to make sure that all the references to elements that had been taken out were removed.

This is a godawful film. The cast has plenty of star power but zero chemistry, and the script is flaming garbage - it's not just supremely unfunny, but the writers failed to establish integral plot points at the beginning, resulting in way too many deus ex machina situations at the end.

My main gripe is that the key to a good heist movie is a clever heist plan that's at least nominally possible IRL. Not Tower Heist! It wasn't as if the writers tried to come up with something and failed; they didn't even try, so the viewer has to pretend that: 1) If the Department of Justice received a communication from a federal judge requiring a court appearance in a huge case on Thanksgiving, a federal holiday where the entire government is closed, they wouldn't question it. (We're going to ignore the fact that federal marshals, not FBI agents, transport defendants under house arrest.) 2) You can dangle a solid gold car weighing at least a ton from a standard window washer's rig or dump it on top of an elevator without the cables snapping.

3) You can dangle a red Ferrari from the top of Trump Tower during the Macy's Thanksgiving day parade and nobody will notice, because there won't be any NYPD helicopters in the area.

4) If you knock out an FBI agent guarding a door, he won't call for backup when he comes to.

5) An elderly woman who comes across four hotel employees pushing a Ferrari down the hall isn't going to ask any questions; she'll just hand them her dog to walk.

If this were fun, I would give it a pass, but the entire movie is strangely joyless.

Half of the heist team isn't necessary, not just for the team, but to the movie itself. Matthew Broderick plays a random Wall Street guy who defaulted on his mortgage payments and lost his condo. He makes no contributions to the heist plan or the plot, and I guess we're supposed to care because he lost his shirt in the same market that enabled him to make his millions in the first place. What?

There's also a problematic racial undercurrent. A White dude wants to steal something but doesn't know how, so he turns to the one Black person he knows, because clearly that person must know how to steal. What? Eddie Murphy's lines sound like a suburban soccer mom's idea of how "urbans" talk. Gabourey Sidibe, equipped with a godawful Jamaican accent for no apparent reason, is the safecracker. Apparently it was on her CV that her father was a locksmith, and Ben Stiller remembered that because he cares so much about his staff (🙄), so of course she knows how to open safes. One of the first things we find out about her is she's about to be deported because her visa has expired, so sure, she'll want to commit a crime that will guarantee her deportation if she gets caught. What? Just a dumpster fire all the way around.

The writing is lazy and laughably bad. It's established within the first five minutes that the male lead is a successful surgeon, more or less happily married to his south Asian wife (a total waste of Indira Varma), whose family is wealthy and politically connected. Within the first 15 minutes, he goes to a party, sees a woman across the room, they lock eyes, and the music lets us know that there is some sort of brooding sexual connection between them. She informs him who she is, he recognizes the name and realizes that this is his son's new flame. This woman doesn't even pretend to be normal or functional; she immediately starts behaving in a way that raises numerous Fatal Attraction red flags. But he has sex with her anyway, jeopardizing both his own relationship and his own son's happiness for reasons that the screenwriter doesn't bother to share with the viewer. They hook up 20 minutes into the first episode. All we know about the son's girlfriend is that she has bangs and eats strangers' cocktail olives in an absurd fashion intended to be seductive. The viewer has been given absolutely no reason why this character feels the need to have an extramarital affair and no reason why this particular woman is the one he must have. And I realized I didn't care at that point.

I would also note that there was a disturbing racial dynamic; the surgeon and his son's girlfriend are the only white people we've been introduced to by that point in the first episode, and it felt weird that they were drawn to each other despite the fact that they are loved and cherished by their south Asian partners. That was kind of gross.

My final comment is that the overbearing score does all the heavy lifting in terms of setting tone and telling the viewer how they are supposed to feel. The screenwriters didn't bother. If you're going to do a series about an obsessive love affair, you have an obligation to create a believable connection between the characters who involved in it. The screenwriters, again, didn't bother.

These eight episodes were visually interesting, but there wasn't enough actual story to fill each episode, the writing was weak, and the visual "horrors" felt quite similar. There were a couple of times when I left the room, came back in five minutes later, and was surprised to find the show still going. It was most glaring in Pickman's Model, which had three different endings before it ended (and tacked a bunch of garbage onto the original Lovecraft story, which is one of his shortest, to stretch it to an hour), and the one about the lotion, which had several scenes that needed to be cut in half or cut altogether. The most interesting episode was "The Viewing," but all of the effort went into the extended scene where they're taking drugs together in the room. The "rock" and everything after felt tacked on; then it ended abruptly without resolution. This was obviously a vanity project for Guillermo Del Toro, and if there is a second season, I won't be bothering with that.

I didn't expect to like the show but I love it. The only reason I didn't give it a better score is because Elarica Johnson ("Autumn Night") is godawful. Her screen presence is lifeless, she can't get the accent right, and the show doesn't even pretend to make you think she can strip.

In a show crammed with vibrant characters and talented actors, Johnson is a noticeable dead spot, and it doesn't help that her corny storyline feels ripped from a Lifetime Movie of the Week. She's obviously there to provide the audience with a window into the world of The Pynk, but there's no reason they couldn't have chosen a better actor to fill that role; I'm convinced that she's the girlfriend of one of the producers.

There's one scene where Mercedes says of Autumn, "all she does is lie there and be light skinned." She could've been talking about Johnson. Apparently season two is her last, and it's a relief; she was miscast, and the show will be better for it.

Once the nostalgia's out of the way, there's no there there; it's a waste of a strong cast. The only remotely likeable character is Tony, the dad; Barbara is a grating social climber and "feminist"; Jenny is an hysterical ninny, and Tim is a womanizing jackass. Emma's precocious, and that's all. I thought she was going to be the focus of the show, but she's incidental to it and substantively the show would have been no different if she had been written out completely.

The episode where the couples pretended to be gay to make friends with new gay neighbors was borderline offensive, and David and Dee, the black couple, were clearly thrown in as a PC nod; they were actually interesting, but they were reduced to cameos. The show never came together; it couldn't decide if it wanted to be The Wonder Years or a slapstick farce and it ended up doing neither one well.

If you're going to take an iconic American comedy (to this day one of my favorites) and serve up a sequel that nobody asked for 30 years later, you'd better make it amazing. Coming 2 America wasn't even close.

The writing was listless and uneven; it's clear that they expected nostalgia, Eddie, and Arsenio to do the work the writers wouldn't, to the extent that about five or six minutes of this movie is actually just footage from the original. But even returning to the My-T-Sharp (where we didn't spend enough time) and hanging out with the ever-messy Randy Watson wasn't able to save this.

Starting off by playing what might have been a sexual assault for laughs, rolling right into the messy colorist dynamic from the original (the light-skinned woman is elegant, demure, and desirable, while the dark-skinned woman is trashy, sexually aggressive, and undesirable -- they've just swapped out Allison Dean's Patrice with Leslie Jones's Mary), and jumping into a half-baked plot that isn't helped by the fact that Akeem's newly discovered son Lavelle isn't as charming or well-developed as Akeem was. Also, the writers forgot that one reason the original worked was giving us a chance to laugh at America's craziness through an outsider's eyes. Seeing Zamunda and Nexdoria through familiar eyes doesn't work at all, partially because the writers never bother to develop those countries beyond a pile of African stereotypes (and they look even worse now in comparison to Wakanda). I also will never understand why they went the PG-13 route; the original was R and the difference is palpable.

The solution to the male heir law is obvious within the first 15 minutes, and the way it's eventually handled is just frustrating; Akeem's amazing daughter gaining the throne only because her goof of a newfound brother abdicates doesn't feel right; it would have been a wack ending in 1995 and it's even worse in 2021. Some aspects of the script feel about 30 years old, and not in a good way. And after you spend nearly two hours plodding through this reboot, you'll feel every one of those 30 years. Just watch the original.

I think I've written one other review in the 10+ years I've been subscribed to IMDb; you have to be unbelievably good or bad to make me put in that effort, and this show is unbelievably bad. "Bad-tempered and foul-mouthed" is not a personality, but it's as far as the writers went with character development for Ben, the coach who leads a parade of one-dimensional Kentuckians in this low-effort entry in Netflix's adult animation lineup. I am no stranger to profanity, and I use it frequently, but Ben makes me look like a piker -- 10 F-bombs in the first two minutes of the show, and that was the whole joke. And it's like that the entire show. Ben doesn't say anything interesting or witty; he just cusses, constantly and gratuitously, to the point where it's just annoying, but somehow never funny. He also has a d*ck fixation that would be creepy in anyone but is extra unsettling in light of his profession. Pretty much everything Ben does is unsettling in light of his profession, and that's obviously part of the joke. However, vignettes like Ben negotiating with a hooker for a 16-year-old prospect aren't even humorous (and they could be); that felt shoehorned in so Ben could rant about BJs for three minutes straight in a failed attempt to be edgy (it served no other purpose).

The show feels like the producers and writers were aiming for "Eastbound and Down" meets "Family Guy" but forgot to add humor, substance, and three-dimensional characters (at least in substance if not appearance). The characters are forgettable, whether it's the ex-wife who can't stand Ben, the sassy full-figured Black female principal (can we stop doing this?), or the one Black player whose "character" is that he loves Billy Joel (get it? it's not rap or hip-hop! that's so hilarious!). The coolest thing so far is the handling of the team's one gay player. He's the most talented one on the team, and Ben and the kids treat him as just one of the guys. I honestly was expecting Ben to drop a different kind of f-bomb, but the producers chose to make him a totally vulgar and toxic Johnny One-Note who is NOT a homophobe.

This might be one of those shows that changes drastically for the better after the pilot, but the pilot was so bad that I won't be coming back to find out. One last note: Netflix is also the home of animation gold like "Big Mouth" and "BoJack Horseman," so this egregious entry looks even worse by comparison.

First, I've come to look forward to the Lab Rats episodes; they provide a much-needed and well-written laugh in a season full of decapitations, disembowelments, and dismemberments (which is all fine with me, or, clearly, I wouldn't love this show to begin with). (Although I have to say that there's usually a touch of comic relief in every CSI episode, even if it was just Gil's terrible pre-credits pun: the show never took itself too seriously for that.) Anyway, this one is a corker, and hats off to Wallace "David Hodges" Langham and Liz "Wendy Sims" Vassey for being part of the writing team. Highlights include: 1) David's view of Doc Robbins. 2) Langston standing in for Hodges and their interaction; I laughed. It was good. You forget that Laurence Fishburne can be funny; between Morpheus and everything else, he never gets a chance to be. He's SO good. And so is Wallace Langham. 3) The three CSIs-in-training who are so obviously junior versions of Grissom, Warrick, and Catherine. I confess to having had a bit of A Moment when Warrick Jr. arrives at the crime scene, Catherine Jr.'s eyes light up, and then she trips and he catches her and they hang on to one another just a bit too long; it was a total shout-out to both the whole Yo!Bling situation and the "Down the Drain" episode, and I remembered how much I miss Gary Dourdan and his interplay with Marg Helgenberger. 4) Duh! The Kiss. I knew Wendy was somehow a keeper from the minute she showed up (and it is not easy to fill Aisha Tyler's shoes), and she's just gotten better and better (Mandy, too; where is she these days?!), but everything she did in this episode, which I will not give away, was awesome.