The Best Man

Bomb Rating: 

"The Best Man" looks a whole lot like "The Wood" to me.

Look, it's one thing to rerelease crappy movies like "Contempt" because some idiot spent the last twenty years of his life recoloring film strips with his computer while living off pork rinds, but it's quite another to rerelease a film only a couple months after its initial run. "The Best Man" looks a whole lot like "The Wood" to me.

So maybe it's not a rerelease, but it's nearly a carbon copy -- a bunch of friends get together because one of them is getting married. And get this, the one who's getting married is Lance (Morris Chestnut), a smart football player. He's not just a street-smart football player, but a book-smart football player -- writer/director Malcolm D. Lee, after all, has graduated him Summa Cum Laude. Memo to Malcolm: Football player and intelligence go together about as well as David E. Kelley and staff lunch buffets.

The best man is Harper (Taye Diggs), an author who's written a book that's such a thin fictionalization of his own life that it's all but transparent to his friends. This causes all sorts of problems as everybody becomes an instant literary critic/psychoanalyst. Harper's other friends are a lawyer with a heart of gold, Murch (Harold Perrineau), and an artistic whiz, Quentin (Terrence Howard).

I haven't even mentioned that Lance is the Giants star running back or that Harper's book is about to be featured on Oprah. The only thing Lee could have done to make these characters any more two-dimensionally impressive would have been to have one of them come up with the cure for cancer during a drunken stupor.

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