there is a substitute timeline where Your peoplethe beginning of the feature film director of kenya barris (blackish), is the next great romantic comedy. There is another version in which it is a biting satire that delves into the stress that parents can inflict on their adult children. There’s an even more distant option, in which it’s a sharp critique of race relations that entertains and tackles the hard truths about cancel culture, privilege, and faith. While the film clearly wants to be all of those options, it ends up giving in under the weight of its intentions and also landing… well, all right.
Directed by Barris and co-written by the protagonist jonah hill, Your people bills itself as a modern twist on Guess who’s coming to dinner. Hill plays Ezra Cohen, an Los Angeles shoemaker and Jewish son, working in finance that he hates while desperately dreaming of being a full-time culture podcaster with his best friend Mo (sam jay). When Ezra accidentally mistakes Amira Mohammed’s (lauren london) because for their shared journey, the two embarked on a whirlwind romance filled with differences that threaten to tear their relationship apart.
Your people he is occasionally funny in spite of himself. Hill oozes his trademark self-deprecating charisma, turning lines that read pitiful into a hilarious kind of deadpan passivity. The cute central encounter is playful and awkward in a way that is closer to sympathy than embarrassment. Like Amira’s father, Akbar Mohammed, eddy murphy he lands a lot of lines that soften the antagonistic aspects of his character, and julia louis dreyfus She pretty much steals the whole damn thing as Ezra’s well-meaning, overbearing Jewish mom, Shelley Cohen. Even the unique characters are played by talented comedic actors, making stars like David Duchovni, Mike Epps, Deon Cole, Molly Gordon, Anthony Anderson, Kym Whitley and more. But the movie can’t decide if it wants to be a love story or a social commentary, and ends up not doing it very well.
The unconvincing pairing of Hill and London has little to do with the interracial aspect of their relationship. The audience is simply never shown what makes them stick together. Your people brings the couple’s relationship into a brief montage of long dates, matching sneakers, and a bond over LA hip-hop culture (London is the former partner of the late Nipsey Hussle, an LA hip-hop icon). . Whatever chemistry the two have in scenes, and there’s is A certain chemistry often fades under the collective incompatibility of their families.
While Ezra’s every emotion and thought process plays out on screen, Amira is given little agency, lines, or emotions other than frustration. London’s absence is even more glaring when a joke about Ezra’s love of cocaine over a boys’ weekend gets more screen time than a genuine confrontation between Amira and Shelley about the Jewish mom treating Amira like a new girl. shiny black barbie to dress up, a shame. as London still manages to shine despite her limited lines.
Yew Your peopleThe only goal of was to deliver a two hour movie with some light laughs, it could be considered a success. You can’t put Hill, Murphy and Louis-Dreyfus at a table and walk away without laughing. But in trying to address dozens of questions about race, privilege, interracial relations, and interfaith families, Your people it becomes a clumsy juggling act and you end up abandoning all these weighty issues in favor of superficial solutions. There are so many gorgeous shots of Los Angeles used as interstitials that anyone who falls asleep (and you just might doze off) will wake up and assume they’re watching any number of videos created by Barris. that T.V. series.
Your people it makes a stronger case for weeding out unhelpful family members than it does for a mutual understanding between different cultures. And even with all the well-timed jokes about vaccines and Kanye West, the movie only manages to rehash old storylines and then throw them out for an unearned sense of family: a shoehorned fix that makes the movie feel less like a modern . takes and more like the same old racing movie with a new pair of Air Jordans. If you’re looking for a comedic version of the world we live in now, this might not be the movie for you. However, your parents might love it.