Our Family Wedding

Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner? America Ferrera and Lance Gross in Our Family Wedding
 
Time Investment: 101 min.
Return on Investment: 1 min.
 
Perhaps the most derivative, joyless and unimaginative movie-going experience in recent memory, Our Family Wedding (Fox Searchlight Pictures) was nothing less, and nothing more, than My Big Fat Blatino Wedding. And where Greek Wedding managed to win over audiences with its naïve charm, bumbling racial references and good-natured stars, Family Wedding comes off as extremely trite all at once, with overwrought racial overtones and histrionics flying.
 
When Mexican beauty Lucia (played by the until-recently Ugly America Ferrera) becomes engaged to African-American hunk Marcus (Lance Gross), their opposed Los Angeles families—each chock-full of offensive stereotypes—become the main obstacles in the path to wedded bliss.
 
The fathers, played by Carlos Mencia and Forest Whitaker, amount to the most glaring blunder in this family mess, as they “get off on the wrong foot” and then try to one-up each other throughout the entire film. Their uninspired rivalry gets so heated and ridiculous I almost thought they were going to start feverishly making out. And judging from the outright racist slurs they throw at each other, the filmmakers would have us believe that all Latino and black communities of Southern California simply hate each other. The only faint glimmers here are the women in the mothers’ roles—Diana-Maria Riva and Regina King—who sincerely try to rise above the banality. King, especially, is always a pleasure to watch, but unfortunately she isn’t nearly enough to save this family wreck.