Guess Who

When the daughter of a wealthy black family and her white boyfriend want to get married they meet with opposition from her overbearing father.
Genre: Feature Film-Comedy
Rating: PG13
Release Date: 30-JAN-2007
Media Type: DVD

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