Kenya Barris has carved out a TV empire for himself thanks to being the creator of Black-ish and two of its spin-offs as well as an executive producer on a slew of Netflix TV programs. Barris has also had a recurring presence in film as a screenwriter but save for being one of the writers on the 2017 comedy Girls Trip, his writing credits have been for a wave of reboots/sequels from major studios like The Witches, Shaft, and that Disney+ Cheaper by the Dozen remake. Considering that he was one of several writers on all these films, not to mention that these were franchise pictures designed to please audience expectations rather than challenge them, it's fair to say Barris's voice hasn't been especially discernible in feature-length narratives up to this point.
With the Netflix comedy You People, Barris, who directs this movie and wrote the script with Jonah Hill, gets a chance to show off his chops at crafting a film without also having to worry about what audiences and studio executives want out of a project like Coming 2 America. The resulting feature shows a welcome willingness on Barris's part to engage in lofty ideas and put his actors in unique roles. Unfortunately, his skills at merging broad comedy with tearjerker moments (at least in the world of film) are so lacking that You People as a whole ends up floundering.
After an awkward mishap involving an Uber ride, podcaster/broker Ezra Cohen (Jonah Hill) and Amira Mohammed (Lauren London) have hit it off and become a couple. They love doing even the most frivolous things together, like brushing their teeth or watching ridiculous TV shows. What they don't love is how their respective families respond to their relationship, with these tensions flaring up as the duo prepares to get married. For Ezra, his mom, Shelley (Julia Lous-Dreyfus) is a perfect portrait of a clueless Liberal white lady. She's the sort of person who speaks about loving Black people but also sees them as just trophies she can use to prove how progressive she is. Meanwhile, Amira's dad, Akbar Mohammed (Eddie Murphy) has a very specific idea of who his daughter should marry and it isn't Ezra. He hates this guy from the get-go and Akbar is looking for any chance to prove to his daughter that Ezra would make a bad husband.
Shortly before my screening of You People started, I realized how long it'd been since I saw a Jonah Hill comedy on the big screen. "I can't wait to see this kind of yukfest theatrically again!" I thought to myself as the lights dimmed. Unfortunately, by the time You People reached its second instance of Hill stretching out an awkward conversation with heavily-improvised dialogue, I realized that I hadn't missed this Judd Apatow-style of comedy as much as I thought I had. Hill is an incredibly talented actor, and he gets to show off his skills in various other parts of You People. Unfortunately, relying on lengthy improvised lines has just never been his strong suit and it's a shame this movie immediately leans so hard on that trait.
From there, You People picks up a bit once Ezra and Amira begin dating and hitting it off. Hill and Barris nicely eschew any post-modernism winks to the camera as these two lovebirds tenderly play footsies on their first date or laugh together in a separate restaurant. The script has enough confidence to realize that committing to romantic sweetness is enough to get the audience on your side. You don't have to earn the trust of moviegoers by poking everybody in the ribs on how common these kinds of montages are. By playing straight-faced, You People immerses us in its central relationship and allows both Hill and London to flourish as actors by depicting the characters navigating the exciting early days of a budding romance.
Just as you need rain to go with the sunshine, so too does You People's script eventually pair this cutesy romance with extended bits of cringe comedy surrounding Ezra's parents socially interacting with Amira. Some of these gags work, especially when they involve David Duchovny playing against type as Ezra's dad who has a deep affection for Xzibit that he'll talk about at the drop of a hat. Still, there's a level of preciseness in timing needed to pull these kinds of sequences off. TV shows like The Rehearsal or The Eric Andre Show are masters at knowing how long cringe-inducing laughs should go on. Cut this type of comedy too short, it never reaches it full potential, but let it go on too long, and you just end up running your gags into the ground. You People, like so many Netflix original movies, unfortunately, has some major pacing issues that undercut the impact of its multiple stabs at cringe comedy. A sequence at a strip club in the third act involving supporting characters talking about Ezra's past, for instance, goes on forever and ever. I think it's still playing as I type up this review!
As You People goes on, it, unfortunately, gets worse, especially in its third act. The last 30-ish minutes of this movie boils down to a series of characters delivering lengthy monologues about their personal feelings. It's a didactic way of communicating information that's never interesting enough in its dialogue to justify why Ezra, Amira, and everyone else in the movie is suddenly turning to the camera to explain the lessons they want audiences to take away from the feature. The largely unimaginative filmmaking from Barris and cinematographer Mark Doering-Powell is especially apparent in these sequences. If these monologues are going to exist, they should feel momentous, but they're so flatly shot and lit. There's no difference between how Ezra and Amira are filmed pouring their hearts out compared to how they're shot just eating dinner together.
The emphasis on ham-fisted pathos in the third act underscores how few of the characters inhabiting You People really come off as, well, people. Amira is especially underserved by the script, with Barris and Hill's screenplay being shockingly uninterested in this character's life beyond her dynamic with Ezra and his family. We only see brief glimpses of her job and even briefer examinations of who her friends are. Eschewing these details leaves poor Lauren London often with nothing to do. Amira is emblematic of You People's greatest problem from a screenwriting perspective. The characters are so generically-defined and arch that attempts to wring poignancy out of them fall flat. Unfortunately, this feels like a more severe case of a similar problem with Hill's last feature film screenwriting credit, Mid90s, which also struggled to lend enough dimension to its respective characters to make pathos-heavy scenes feel earned.
That's all a shame since the actors in You People are not sleepwalking through this project. Eddie Murphy especially seems to be enjoying himself in a more restrained than usual part while Julia Louis-Dreyfus, a veteran of uncomfortable comedy thanks to Seinfeld, scores some glib chuckles in personifying White lady cluelessness. Solid performances and brief glimmers of more interesting examinations of weighty ideas keep You People from flaming out entirely. Alas, while it's nice to see Jonah Hill and Eddie Murphy headlining a feature-length comedy in 2023, You People comes up short more often than it proves amusing, especially in its poorly conceived third act. At least it's better than an earlier film penned by Barris, The Witches.
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