What an incredibly unfunny movie. There are a lot of things wrong with Neil Labute's remake of the British comedy Death at a Funeral, but the main problem seems to be that Labute is not a comedy director. Sure his version of The Wicker Man elicited copious amounts of laughter, but that was all unintentional comedy - Death at a Funeral is the complete opposite film, save for the fact that they are both terrible.
Chris Rock and Martin Lawrence play a pair of brothers, reunited by the funeral of their father. Throughout the day, they encounter nothing but trouble from all sorts of people, and the funeral is heading for disaster, to say the least. Of course, funerals aren't the type of affairs that people try to make perfect for the sake of remembering, but no one wants to suffer through a bad funeral, right?
What makes this particular funeral so awful? The family dynamics are already dysfunctional, so one one gets along with anyone else, a few people end up on hallucinogenic drugs, and a gay dwarf (Peter Dinklage) tries to blackmail the family with the threat of exposing the deceased party's own homosexual proclivities. While familial dysfunction, drug use and homophobia have been used for great comedic purposes in the past, they combine to make 90 minutes of unfunny material in this film.
What is the point of giving so many people so few jokes? Why on Earth did they get Chris Rock, one of the best comedians on the planet, to plat the most straight, serious role in the movie? Keith David as the Priest has more comedic potential than Rock's character, and that says a ton considering how little Keith David gets to do. Tracy Morgan serves no purpose other than to run around and holler and mug and be boring, and Martin Lawrence just comes across as completely unlikable and downright creepy as the film only asks him to be a selfish pedophile (the film is also perfectly okay with this character's pedophilia). Danny Glover plays an obnoxious, mean old man and I guess Labute thought that was funny enough, as opposed to having the character actually do anything. Zoe Saldana is stuck between a drugged out and campy James Marsden and a douchy Luke Wilson.
Apparently the plot (and theoretically, the jokes) are very similar, if not identical, to the original. However, changing the family from a prim and uptight English clan to an American Black family changes the dynamics of the plot points. A daughter desperate for her father to approve her choice of boyfriend is one thing - it comes off differently when it is a Black father rejecting a white suitor (though Labute hedges his bets by having the daddy-approved love rival also be white). And I don't know if this was featured in the original, but watching Danny Glover sh*t on Tracy Morgan's hand is not funny. Nor is it funny to watch Morgan unsuccessfully wash his sh*tty hand and splash it around the bathroom. Caddyshack and Austin Powers have both taught the world that actual poop is not funny, it is when something is mistaken as waste (Austin Powers example: Austin Powers drinks Fat Basterd's diahrrea in AP2, whereas his drinking of apple juice in AP3 gets mistaken by other characters for urine sampling). Then again, Labute thought it was a good idea to have Nic Cage drop kick women in the face in The Wicker Man, so perhaps he is not the best harbinger of tasteful cinema. To say the least, Death at a Funeral is plain bad, and I don't know if I can sit through the same story again, British or not.
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