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Taken on its own terms as a big-screen sitcom,
Guess Who offers plenty of humor with just enough social commentary to make its point without being preachy. Of course, we've come along way since interracial romance was such a hot-button issue in Stanley Kramer's earnest 1967 drama
Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, and nobody's going to mistake Ashton Kutcher and Bernie Mac (in this updated semi-remake) with the original film's Sidney Poitier and Spencer Tracy. And that's fine, because
Guess Who--from the director of
Barbershop 2--doesn't pretend to be anything more than a slick, entertaining vehicle for domestic farce with the racial roles reversed. Kutcher's romance with an African-American beauty (Zoë Sandaña) causes sparks to fly when he's introduced to her father (Bernie Mac). What ensues is basically an interracial buddy comedy that's as uninspired as it is easy to watch, and there's a dinner-table scene that's refreshingly provocative in this movie's otherwise tamely cautious context. We can all be thankful that humanity has matured a little since the racial tensions of the late '60s, but Hollywood's progress (and Kutcher's career) remains subject to debate.
--Jeff Shannon
From The New Yorker
Any similarity between this movie and "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" is strictly coincidental. Ashton Kutcher plays a successful stockbroker who quits his job the day before he and his fiancée (Zoë Saldaa) are scheduled to travel to the New Jersey suburbs to meet her parents (Bernie Mac and Judith Scott). The tired complications of the plot are knocked off without benefit of ingenuity, believability, insight-or laughs. If there's any emotional or intellectual juice left in the subjects of interracial marriage and liberal hypocrisy, it's not to be found here. This is a movie made in a boardroom, a merger of Bernie-Ashton demographics.-Ken Marks -Ken Marks
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker