The great David Alan Grier deserves to headline a big-time summer comedy—albeit one superior to this second-rate Meet the Parents–style farce. Grier’s Judge Virgil Peeples is a demanding paterfamilias who frowns mightily upon Wade (The Office’s Craig Robinson)—the new beau of his daughter, Grace (Kerry Washington)—for crashing a family get-together at his summer home. (The fact that Wade is a doofus who counsels kids with songs about not peeing on things doesn’t help matters.) Over the course of a weekend, Wade is humped by a dog, burns down a sacred tepee and hallucinates on mushrooms, all while Virgil steams at this interloper’s bumbling attempts to ask for Grace’s hand in marriage and thus integrate himself into the upper-class clan.
Familial secrets are eventually cast into the light (lesbianism, substance abuse, kleptomania), albeit via uniformly underlit and ungainly direction by Tina Gordon Chism. Still, Grier’s comedic timing remains spot-on, and his rapport with Robinson is often pleasingly prickly. But defined by Three’s Company–grade humor, this attempt at male-anxiety cringe-comedy is little more than a sitcom writ large that—courtesy of several awkward transitional fades to black—already feels constructed to accommodate commercial breaks.
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