Review: "The Best Man Holiday"

I must confess I watched the entirety of "The Best Man Holiday," started writing this review, and only just discovered that it was a sequel. I barely remember the 1999 romantic dramedy, "The Best Man," about a bunch of friends muddling through post-college struggles with careers and relationships.

In retrospect, it seemed an odd title, considering the only wedding is seen in flashback at the beginning, along with a bunch of other snippets from the first movie -- plus new clips to fill in the gaps of what's happened since. If you haven't seen the original (or forgotten it), these don't go a long way in bringing you up to speed.

(Short version: there are four men and five women, all gorgeous African-Americans, some of them have slept with others, some are now married to each other, and there's crossover between those two lists.)

Now it's 15 years later, the friends are approaching 40 and inevitably grown apart. Harper, the author played by Taye Diggs, is no longer the alpha dog of the guys. After a big initial success with a book loosely based on his friends, his follow-up efforts haven't hit it big, and he can't even get his latest work published.

Lance (Morris Chestnut) is now winding up a stellar career as a running back for the New York Giants. He's the most popular player in the NFL, going for the all-time rushing record in his final season. Harper's agent pushes him to write a biography of his friend and cash in.

Of course, rather than just coming right out and asking him, Harper has to dance around Lance for the entire movie, until the unavoidable discovery of his true intentions and the subsequent confrontation.

The whole gang is getting back together at the urging of Lance's wife Mia (Monica Calhoun), who wants them all to stay at their massive mansion for the week of Christmas. She has ulterior motives that aren't too hard to figure out, and which set up the entire second, sappier half of the film.

Harper's wife Robyn (Sanaa Lathan) is about to have their first baby, so he's having all sorts of money/daddy/responsibility issues. Complicating things further is that Mia and Harper had a thing back in the day, and Lance still holds a grudge the size of a linebacker.

Rounding out the cast are Harold Perrineau as Julian, now running an inner-city private school with his ex-stripper wife, Candace (Regina Hall), who finds his funding drying up when her notorious past gets YouTubed; Shelby (Melissa De Sousa), the outrageous girl now a reality TV star, famous for her divorces and obnoxious behavior; Jordan (Nia Long), the committed career girl who's testing the waters of monogamy with a white guy; and Terrence Howard as Quentin, the resident comedic relief and slacker, who's somehow managed to become filthy rich.

Writer/director Malcolm D. Lee puts his cast through some ostentatiously predictable paces, with an emphasis on cheap clashes and souped-up conflict. For instance, at one point Robyn observes Harper consoling Jordan in an obviously chaste embrace after the group receives some bad news, yet she still goes into a jealous huff.

A bunch of the characters have children, who wear amazing clothes and have even better manners. All the kids mysteriously disappear whenever there's a meal or important conversation. Lance, despite having a big game on Christmas Day, only attends one brief practice with his team.

This movie is a bunch of aspirational hooey, jam-packed with false Very Important Moments. In the course of the story there is a wedding (the flashback), a funeral, a birth, a death, a retirement, some breakups and some hook-ups. What's lacking is any surprises.

I still enjoyed spending time with these people; I just wish the warm-and-funny vibe of "The Best Man Holiday" didn't feel like freeze-dried leftovers.

Review: "Zero Dark Thirty"

"Zero Dark Thirty" plays out like a TV crime procedural with a bigger budget and loftier aspirations. It almost has the tone of a documentary film, depicting the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden with little prejudice or embellishment.

What we end up with is something boasting an almost journalistic feel, portraying American national security personnel not as we'd to think they would be, but as they actually are. Which is to say: focused, fallible, and capable of both amazing heroism and gut-churning brutality.

Director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal started to make a movie about the early search for bin Laden after 9/11, but then the terrorist leader was assassinated by U.S. troops in 2011, acting on information painstakingly gathered by the CIA. They quickly retooled to bring a more comprehensive tale, culminating in the high-tension raid on the compound in Pakistan where bin Laden had been living for several years.

I was very impressed with the attention to detail in "Zero Dark Thirty," and its lessons about the sort of warfare our country wages in the 21st century. It's one based not on nuclear missiles or big metal hardware, but tiny slivers of data gathered from thousands of sources. The challenge is less like finding a needle in a haystack than reassembling a mirror smashed into a million shards, without knowing the shape it had before being broken.

The film is not as emotionally engaging as I'd wished. Jessica Chastain does yeoman's work in portraying Maya, the one CIA investigator who does nothing for a decade but hunt bin Laden. The character has no internal motivations or external life beyond getting her man. It's not surprising that Maya is a composite of several real figures, since she has no real identity beyond her mission.

The story skips around in time and place, the first half depicting the early clues to bin Laden's disappearance from Afghanistan, taking us up to 2004. Then the trail goes cold, and the film picks up again four years later, when Maya stumbles across evidence of a high-level bin Laden courier who most of the other intelligence forces believe is already dead. She proves he's alive, and follows him straight to that dusty Pakistani compound.

In fictional movies about spycraft, the agents shown searching for evidence are also the ones who go out into the field and nab the bad guys. Here, it's clearly revealed that the snoops stay mostly behind their desks and have an uneasy relationship with the troops on the front lines. At one point, Maya has to practically beg a field commander to set up a surveillance net on the courier.

In the film's most controversial section, which is right at the beginning, a CIA interrogator named Dan (Jason Clarke, in a chilling performance) is shown employing "enhanced" methods against detainees, including waterboarding.

For a film that was accused of being controversial before it even finished production, "Zero Dark Thirty" is steadfastly neutral on the subject of torture. The interrogations are clearly depicted as brutal and dehumanizing, and it's hard to watch Americans carrying out these sorts of depraved actions. But the movie is also quite clear in showing how the information obtained in this way was critical to identifying the courier who led us to bin Laden.

Bigelow and Boal do not go in for big ethical quandaries and principled dilemmas, though. Maya, who is present but does not partake in the brutality, is repulsed by it but also does not hesitate to make use of the fruits it produces.

"Zero Dark Thirty" is an effective and expertly made film, but a more character-driven story would've added some flesh to the bones of a great, true story.

3.5 stars out of four