BEFORE: You know what day it is, I don't have to tell you, all eyes are on Las Vegas for the first-ever Super Bowl held in Sin City, and I guess the game's going to be held there from now on, because what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, right? Oh, is that not how it works? I guess not, because people are all watching live, that thing is like global or something. Tonight's film takes place in Las Vegas, and I swear I did not plan that, how could I have done such a thing? I wasn't thinking a month ago about the Super Bowl or where it was going to be held, I was just trying to put together a romance-themed film chain that cleared the most material from my watchlist. It's just another random coincidence, there have been hundreds of them on this long journey.
Kevin Hart, Regina Hall, and 15 others carry over from "Think Like a Man", but for those two actors, this is their third appearance this year, so they've qualified for the year-end countdown.
I'm almost tempted to save this one for June, because I can see how it could link two or three Father's Day films, and that seems important, but thematically I think this belongs here, I mean, any time I get a chance to watch a film and its sequel back-to-back I should take it, right? I'll have to figure out something else when June rolls around - anyway, I can't tell yet which Father-themed films will fit into my chain, so I can't possibly know which ones need to be linked together, it's just too soon. Anyway, I want the Las Vegas connection today.
EDIT: I forgot that Turner Classic Movies was starting their "31 Days of Oscar" programming on February 9, so I'm going back and dropping them in post facto. They're dividing up the movies by category this year, so today is Day 3, devoted to:
Best Supporting Actress Nominees:
6:15 am "Primrose Path" (1940)
8:00 am "Love Affair" (1939)
9:30 am "The Magnificent Ambersons" (1942)
11:00 am "Jezebel" (1938)
1:00 pm "My Man Godfrey" (1936)
3:00 pm "Pillow Talk" (1959)
5:00 pm "A Passage to India" (1984)
Best Supporting Actress Winners:
8:00 pm "The Razor's Edge" (1946)
10:45 pm "None But the Lonely Heart" (1944)
1:00 am "Key Largo" (1948)
3:00 am "Anthony Adverse" (1936)
I think I've seen 4 out of these 11, "The Magnificent Ambersons", "Pillow Talk", "A Passage to India" and "Key Largo", so 16 out of 33 overall, slipping down to 48.4%. But come on, they know the Super Bowl is on today, so they're not airing the best movies...
THE PLOT: All the couples are back for a wedding is Las Vegas, but plans for a romantic weeked go awry when their misadventures get them into compromising situations that threaten to derail the big event.
AFTER: It will still be a few hours before we know any football results - I may not start watching until 8 pm, so I can fast-forward through the gameplay and just watch the opening ceremonies, halftime show and the commercials. Yeah, I'm funny like that, but I spent maybe 15 years working at a job where I had to record the SuperBowl commercials and edit them together for review and commentary, so that's what I'm still conditioned to focus on. Since Tom Brady retired and the Patriots stopped making it to the finals almost every year, I really don't care about the game part any more. Or Taylor Swift, for that matter, so I'm out. I think if she WERE working for the Pentagon, which she's definitely not, that would at least be ONE interesting thing about her, but otherwise, she's like Wonder Bread, she's just kind of there with no flavor or much nutrition, and she was designed for and marketed to the masses of teen girls, and I'm not one of those.
We were in Las Vegas in October 2019, and that was just a few months before the world shut down, it was our last vacation before the pandemic, we unknowingly made the most of it. We stayed at THREE different hotels over the course of a week, which sounds a bit ridiculous, because who does that, but one was on Fremont St. (Golden Nugget), another was mid-strip (Bally's) and the third was on the south part of the strip (Luxor). And that gave us a couple days to explore the casinos and other things in three different sections. I think we gambled in 18 or 20 different casinos, we went on that giant ferris wheel, and I ate at five different buffets in 8 days, plus we hit a number of other restaurants, too. My wife got sick during the last couple of days so I explored on my own a bit while she slept, and then getting her through the airport on the return trip was a bit of a challenge - nobody was wearing masks back then or concerned about spreading viruses, it was a different time.
But somewhere along the way, I had a bit of a revelation, after we went to the Venetian (fake Italy), the Paris (fake France), the Luxor (fake Egypt) and New York, New York (yup, fake NYC) and then took in a performance of "Legends in Concert" (featuring fake Elvis, fake Freddie Mercury, fake Pat Benatar and fake Lady Gaga). What, if anything, about Las Vegas, was real and not just a fake version of another city or another culture or a dead celebrity? Not much, in my opinion, suddenly I saw that the whole town was not about being real, it was just like a mirage in the desert, maybe it's not even really there and we just were imagining it all, along with our dreams of winning a jackpot or getting comped at some fancy hotel. I'm being facetious here, because we also ate at Hell's Kitchen, saw an exhibit of artifacts from the Titanic, and went to the Mob Museum and the Neon Sign Museum. Those things were real, I think, and our trip definitely happened, we didn't just imagine it.
But it's definitely the land of dreams and false promises, which brings me to today's film. The five couples (plus Cedric, who was divorced, got back together with Gail and is now flying solo again) arrive in Vegas with big plans for the wedding of Michael and Candace, but also the guys are planning a wild bachelor party, as guys do, and the gals are planning a wild bachelorette party, as gals do. What could POSSIBLY go wrong? There are a lot of couples getting married in Vegas, so they have like a 30-minute window where they all have to show up at this chapel, and if they're not there on time, they'll forfeit the wedding space, and worse, not get their deposit back. So yeah, by all means, plan the bachelor and bachelorette party for the NIGHT BEFORE, that's really when you should all do a lot of drinking and get into a bunch of shenanigans. Jesus, this is really bad planning, I mean, give yourselves 24 hours to recover from a wild night out if you need to show up somewhere dressed to the nines and awake and alert. Right?
But that's not the worst offense here, the sequel completely abandons the framework of Steve Harvey's book, which is what got us all here, that's the main reason why four of these five couples even got coupled in the first place, because they all learned which personality type they are, and how to deal with the personality type of their intended partner. So without Steve Harvey's advice, they're going to tend to backslide into non-understanding of their partners, and that puts them all in jeopardy here. "The Dreamer" gets tempted by a head chef position at a Vegas restaurant, while "The Woman Who Is Her Own Man" gets offered a COO position in New York, and they're each afraid to tell their partner about their new opportunities. The "90-Day Rule Girl" has to deal with the past of her partner "The Player" when all the people in Vegas remember him as "Zeke the Freak" and they encounter at least two women that he'd been with and didn't call afterwards. And "The Girl Who Wants the Ring" got the ring, so she and "The Non-Committer" are now trying to become parents, but come on, they'll be fine, they'll work that out.
The big focus here then is on "The Mama's Boy" and "The Single Mom", who are the couple getting married. Michael's mother, Loretta, has taken over planning the wedding and the Vegas trip, so she keeps butting heads with Candace, whose friends just want to take her out for that wild night, while Loretta would just prefer that they all have high tea and then go see Dionne Warwick in concert. Wow, sure, sounds like fun, if you're over 60. Unfortunately Michael has reverted to trying to please his mother instead of his wife, with the reasoning that he's got the rest of his life to spend with Candace, but his mother only gets to see her son get married once. Umm, whatever happened to "It's the bride's day, first and foremost"? Eventually this all gets resolved, and it's exactly what I predicted after watching yesterday's film, that Candace would understand her mother-in-law's feelings because she's a mother herself, and she wouldn't want her own son to un-invite her to his wedding. Nailed it!
But then there are the disasters along the way - Cedric gets held up at the blackjack table, because he found out how much the giant suite at Caesar's Palace REALLY costs, so he's just GOT to win enough money to cover his hotel bill - but really, that's not how Vegas works, is it? You should only gamble with money that you're prepared to lose, and remember that the house almost always wins in the end, unless you can somehow quit when you're up. Hardly anyone does this, because winning a small amount of money leads you to believe that you WILL WIN a larger sum of money, and, well, that's just not the case, most of the time. I will say that what then happens at the roulette table is something I haven't seen before in any movie with gambling in it, but no spoilers here.
Out of desperation, the guys decide to perform in an amateur male exotic dancing competition, the plan is to win first, second and third place and thus cover the massive hotel bill. This would be a great plan if the contest were legit, but remember this is a fake city where nothing is real in the end, so really, they never had a chance. But the bachelor party and the bachelorette party end up at the same club (what are the ODDS?) and the guys are drunk and the girls are high, so naturally the whole thing goes south and they all end up in jail. Which would only be a problem if they had a wedding to go to the next morning, right?
There are so many diversions here, like the makeover sequence for a character who wasn't even IN the first film (I was willing to bet that Bennett had a black wife, but I guess I missed something) and the whole female hip-hop music video sequence just felt like filler, but eventually the film does get to a wedding scene, it just takes its time getting there. I have to call a NITPICK POINT on somebody winning a jackpot on a dollar bet on a slot machine, since every slot machine I've ever encountered would have a minimum bet of at least six quarters to make you eligible for any kind of jackpot. The ones where you can just bet three or four quarters to qualify have all been taken out of circulation, even the penny slots have a minimum bet of 100 pennies, which come on, really makes them dollar slots, not penny slots.
Also starring Michael Ealy, Jerry Ferrara, Meagan Good, Taraji P. Henson, Gabrielle Union, Terrence Jenkins, Jenifer Lewis, Romany Malco, Gary Owen, La La Anthony, Wendy Williams, Caleel Harris, Angela Elayne Gibbs, Luenell, Will Packer (all carrying over from "Think Like a Man")
Dennis Haysbert (last seen in "The Dark Tower"), Wendi McLendon-Covey (last seen in "Over Her Dead Body"), David Walton (last seen in "Burlesque"), Adam Brody (last seen in "Shazam! Fury of the Gods"), Jim Piddock (last seen in "The Cold Light of Day"), Kelsey Grammer (last seen in "Father Christmas Is Back"), Cheryl Hines (last seen in "Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time"), Fonzworth Bentley (last seen in "Idlewild"), George Wallace (last seen in "Just Getting Started"), Ray Proscia, Janina Gavankar (last seen in "The Way Back"), Nicholas Gullak (last seen in "The Laundromat"), Pedro Miguel Arce (last seen in "Special Correspondents"), Terrell Carter, Chasty Ballesteros (last seen in "The Mummy" (2017)), Morann Peri, Jeff Corbett (last seen in "The United States vs. Billie Holliday"), Corey Holcomb (last seen in "The Wedding Ringer"), Courtney Enea, Brenda Vivian, Shad Gaspard (last seen in "Birds of Prey"), Chaun Williams.
with cameos from Coco Austin, Drake (last seen in "De Palma"), Floyd Mayweather Jr., Carl Weathers (last heard in "Toy Story 4") and archive footage of Frank Sinatra (last seen in "Elvis"), Dean Martin (last seen in "Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You") and Sammy Davis Jr. (last seen in "What Happened, Miss Simone?")
RATING: 5 out of 10 place settings at the giant dinner table in the Constantine Suite
No comments:
Post a Comment