Let me be blunt with this: “You People” took what could’ve been an edgy, incisive & intelligent take on interracial relationships and made it a very uncomfortable movie to watch. And the worst part of it is it’s entirely 50-50 on who’s really at fault for this.
Taking the basic premise of 1967’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and retooling it for millennials, Kenya Barris’s direction to make it a natural progression of that is, unfortunately, anything but natural. There’s this very broad tonal issue at display in almost every scene and it creates a weird narrative disconnect despite some connective tissue clearly being present.
The acting is thankfully passable and they make the best out of the material, even though they clearly have the pedigree to make these jokes work but the characters themselves are walking cliches, utterly one-note and lacking severe chemistry with anyone. Dialogue and its execution is very strained and manufactured, production design was fine but notwithstanding, there is no room for subtlety or tension at any point and despite the annoyingly crisp aesthetic of the cinematography, it’s awkwardly edited like a sketch comedy as opposed to something that flows from one scene to the next between the overbearing soundtrack and REALLY inane, awkward, outdated jokes overcrowding 78% of the runtime here. It's 2023, we should’ve moved beyond the ridiculous viewpoints and stereotypes displayed in this film.
Shoddy pacing equipped with the two hour runtime did little to improve anything.
Nearly everything of what I saw here was a textbook amalgamation of the worst stereotypes around black, muslim and Jewish people despite its message purposely trying to promote and showcase the opposite; there’s nothing wrong with the story being so straightforward but it’s attempt to be earnest doesn’t leave its viewers a whole lot of room to really interpret the challenges of today’s racial landscape, utterly muddling the many nuances of cross-cultural families. In some ways, it accidentally creates a “reverse racism” false equivalency in regards to the cultural tensions between oppression narratives and every time there’s potential for a satirical idea to pull through and inject some dark humor, it turns regressive and, quite frankly, antisemitic.
Never mind that this story has been made about a million times already and ends almost exactly the same way, the rom-com element of this rom-com gets relegated to the back seat almost immediately thus taking it for granted, the set-up that comes before it is so bloody lame, it is so blisteringly unfunny and that what’s makes the ending of this movie particularly insulting: it’s a half baked, rushed reconciliation that doesn’t offer any real resolution to ANY of what the film builds up, which is not much.
The tragic thing about this story here is that it was, and still is, a good idea to explore in films. There are SO MANY WAYS for a comedy to dive into culture clashes when racially diverse couples come together and there is not a better time to dissect those depths than now, in a day and age where so many people make it their mission to silence and invalidate people like us for even existing. But movies that are about racism not only have to be intentional, there needs to be confidence in what the underlying point of the story is supposed to be. Here it comes off like someone reinforcing points that we already know in the most obnoxious manner possible without settling on a direction.
Far from the worst thing in the world but probably the most deliberately annoying film I’ve seen this year as of yet.
