Bringing Down the House (2003)

IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards 

BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE

Directed by Adam Shankman

PG-13, 105 minutes

Imagine you are on a slow train moving through a tunnel lined with familiar advertising posters, with no idea of where you're going, nothing to read, nobody to talk to. Every once in a while the train bursts into the open, and for a few moments you get a flash of delightful scenery. Then another tunnel swallows you up.

This is pretty much the experience of the irrelevantly titled "Bringing Down the House", the humdrum comedy that has placed under house arrest performers like Steve Martin, Queen Latifah, Eugene Levy, and a few others, some with talent, some who fit the material like a latex glove. The material, courtesy of a first-time screenwriter named Jason Filardi, should give hope to all of us with unsold screenplays in our sock drawers. It is directed by Adam Shankman, who previously piloted another pop star, J-Lo, onto the rocks with "The Wedding Planner". (But shed no tears of sympathy for Queen Latifah, who produced, and presumably helped shape, this mess.)

Tax attorney Peter Sanderson (Martin) is one of those uptight workaholics whose marriage has crumbled under the weight of late nights at the office and no time for the kids. Seeking feminine companionship, he enters into a chat room correspondence with a woman named Charlene Morton, who uses the moniker LawyerGirl, and sends him a picture that features a cute white blonde in front of a courthouse. When they make a date and she turns up at his house, however, she is not the babe in the photo's foreground. She is big, bold, buxom, brassy and black. She is Queen Latifah, and boy is this a problem in Peter's whitebread neighborhood!

Charlene does in fact turn out to be involved with the law, but on the shady side of it. She's been doing time for a robbery she claims she didn't commit, and she wants Peter to take her case. When he shows her the door, she breaks back in while he's out, and somehow manages in the course of a few hours to throw a huge party at his house for every African-American in town. When he objects, she threatens him with blackmail. After a while, her guilt or innocence on the armed robbery charge comes to seem irrelevant.

This is one of those movies that milk the culture clash of white squareness and black hipness for all it's worth, which in this case is not very much. Maybe all the good gags were used up in "The Jerk", a racial comedy from Martin's happier days. Here, the principle vein of humor being mined is that every time Charlene shows up in Peter's whites-only world she has to pretend to be a maid or a nanny and do a little ironic Tomming to haul his bacon out of the fire. If you find wit in the sight gag of Peter's kids smuggling Charlene into the house behind an inflatable pool raft while nosey neighbor Betty White glares suspiciously, you're in for a better time than I had.

But Martin and Latifah are funny people, and in spite of everything they can't help busting out every so often. She tries to teach him how to put some macho in his lovemaking, and they pour so much energy into the scene you can't help laughing. The great British dame Joan Plowright manages to pump humor into a situation as tired as the old saw about a snooty woman smoking a joint with a couple of black hipsters and getting funky. And Levy performs miracles with his marginal screen time as Peter's law partner who falls for Charlene: when she tells him to turn the car around and head downtown and he deadpans "Downtown is where I live, baby!" you might forget yourself and think for a moment you were at a real comedy.

But for every pint of humor there's a gallon of swill. A measure of director Shankman's finger on the pulse of the comic muse is an endless and torturously unamusing cat-fight between Charlene and skinny white Ashley (Missi Pyle) in the ladies' locker room at the country club.

For all its posturing as an equal opportunity comedy, "Bringing Down the House" doesn't have the courage to bring its leads together romantically. With prompting from Latifah, Martin gets his hands on the formidable mounds of her chest, but no sacred or profane love is allowed to spring up between them. While he patches things up with his wife (Jean Smart), the Queen is fobbed off on second banana Levy, and even they are protected by a strategically drawn window shade from the possible regional box office virus of an interracial kiss.

Movies like this come out in March for a reason. The cast is appealing, the previews are enticing, and the producers can count on making back their nut before the public wises up.

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