Day 170: Undercover Brother (2002)

PG-13, 1 hr. 25 min.  Directed by: Gregory Dark, Malcolm D. Lee. Release Date: May 31, 2002. DVD Release Date: January 14, 2003.

There are times when you see a cast gathered to do a movie and it blows your mind how fantastic it is.  Some can act, some look good and don't embarrass themselves, some are cool, and some are just along for the ride, but it could still work.  This wasn't one of those casts.  Most of these guys have hit or miss relationships with success, so it certainly couldn't have been easy to pull something like this off.  Fortunately for the filmmakers, this is a parody of well, lots of things.  There are some Blaxploitation elements, some stuff straight out of Bond, and this is possibly hanging on a bit to the coattails of Austin Powers and his merry band of 60s British invasion humor.

Let's talk about some of the decent performances I saw here.  Eddie Griffith is very toned down from what I expect to see from him.  He manages to be funny without being more ridiculous than the role requires.  Chi McBride does a great job, although I wish he was both funnier and in more scenes.  Neil Patrick Harris was awesome, but in the same way he was awesome in the Harold & Kumar movies.  That kind of awesome that works, but the part is so small he doesn't really contribute to the overall success of the film.  But the real surprise was Denise Richards.  She still sucked acting wise, but the girl's got a half-decent set of pipes... and that in no way is a reference to chest, because as we should all know, that is way more decent than half.   I didn't hate Chris Kattan, either.  He was funny without falling into that retardation mode he likes to live in.

Like too many movies, this is funny, but not in that way that makes you proud to be laughing.  It's also not going to be to everyone's taste.  Truth, it's not really to mine, although I do occasionally find this kind of stuff funny.  The characters are absolutely ridiculous, but they all seem to work together in a way that makes more sense than they probably should.

I probably shouldn't admit this publicly, but I liked the soundtrack.  Check this out if you like screwball comedies and are really, really open-minded.  Otherwise, take a pass.