Film Review: YOU PEOPLE

An uncomfortable family meeting.

I am writing this as a public service: Do NOT waste five minutes on this movie, currently streaming on Netflix and somehow earning positive reviews from critics at The New York Times, Variety and several other outlets. Starring Eddie Murphy, Jonah Hill and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, you'd think it would be funny or at least worthwhile; after all, those are some pretty big names and they wouldn't appear in a dog, would they? Well, you'd be wrong. 

The subject is race relations, and that's woke enough to get people interested. The plot is Guess Who's Coming to Dinner updated, but terrible. Maybe back in 1967 a white girl bringing home a black boyfriend was shocking, but today mixed couples are commonplace, seen virtually everywhere, especially in TV commercials where nobody raises an eyebrow. Oddly enough, they do in You People, making the whole thing from start to finish totally unbelievable and often downright cringey.

Hill stars as Ezra, a 35-year-old mama's boy who wants a relationship but keeps striking out, mostly because he's a big baby. His overbearing mother Shelley (Louis-Dreyfus), a rich, phony liberal who just loooooves black people but not necessarily as the mother of her grandchildren, fawns all over Ezra's girlfriend Amira (Lauren London) at their first meeting, making inappropriate comments searching for conversation, like complimenting Lauren's braids and bling and bemoaning the treatment of black cops or the treatment by black cops, or something like that. It's too awful to watch.

Even worse, Amira's father Akbar (Murphy) is a militant Muslim who apparently hates all white people. His first meeting with Ezra goes badly as well, perpetuating stereotypical racial differences. 

I felt like just watching this film, all alone and in the privacy of my own home, was setting back race relations hundreds of years and so turned it off in the middle. Instead I read the summation online and learned that they get married and live happily ever after. Look for them today in every TV commercial.