Death At A Funeral 2 stars
Screen Gems, Rated R
Death at a Funeral manages to come up an entire new genre: Post-mortem gross-out. And while the original 2007 Frank Oz British farce on which this film is based was supposedly a barrel of laughs, telling the story of a lost and found corpse in a coffin, the main question here is: Did we really need to do this all over again?
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Relocating the story from the UK to an affluent African American clan, director Neil LaBute, whose last film Lakeview Terrace reassigned entrenched U.S. racism to black suburbia, dredges up sour humor as a product of black homophobia. Adding to the aforementioned new genre are laugh-out-lewd feces fun and games, and a little dwarf tossing here and there as a served up side order of mean spirited midget mockery.
Chris Rock (L.) and Martin Lawrence star in Death At A Funeral
Chris Rock is Aaron, the son of a revered, just-deceased patriarch whose family is gathering from around the country for the home service. Things go awry from the start with the delivery of the wrong corpse in the coffin, and that’s just the beginning of a series of mishaps: One guest loses a vial of potent hallucinogenic pills labeled as valium, which ends up in the digestive tract of Oscar (James Marsden), the nervous wreck boyfriend of Aaron’s cousin Elaine (Zoë Saldaña). He mistakenly ends up on the roof chasing karma, minus his clothes.
There’s more: A mysterious gay midget (Peter Dinklage) with malice on his mind infiltrates the service in order to blackmail the family. Successful novelist sibling Ryan (Martin Lawrence) claims he is broke and pesters his resentful underachiever brother to help. Family foe Norman (Tracy Morgan) tends to elder Uncle Russell’s (Danny Glover) bathroom accident, but ends up the facial recipient of Uncle’s, to put it as delicately as possible, excremental accident.
Shockingly, the film’s attitude towards bereavement is likely the film’s least downside, despite impressive performances. In any case, this Funeral is definitely not a movie to die for.
