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you-people-review .jpg

'You People' Is Profoundly Unpleasant

By Dustin Rowles | Film | February 1, 2023 |

By Dustin Rowles | Film | February 1, 2023 |


you-people-review .jpg

You People, co-written by Jonah Hill and Kenya Barris, the latter of whom also directs, is about a Jewish man, Ezra (Hill), and a Black woman, Amira (Lauren London), who fall in love and decide to marry. The catch is their parents. Amira’s father, Akbar (Eddie Murphy) doesn’t like Ezra because he’s white, and Ezra’s mother, Shelley (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) treats Amira’s Blackness as a cool novelty. Seventy percent of the film involves Akbar making life for Ezra as difficult as possible, or Shelley saying painfully tone-deaf things in front of Amira. It’s awful, and I hated it.

You People is a profoundly unpleasant movie because it is uncomfortable to watch, but not in the sense that it is depicting an uncomfortable reality or presenting uncomfortable truths. It is uncomfortable because it is cringey, and because Barris and Hill wrote it to be cringey. They mistake cringe for truth. It’s not an honest movie about race or about Judaism or representation. It is written as a comedy in the sense that Steve Carell’s impression of Chris Rock on The Office was written as a comedy, only this is a two-hour movie and the affluent Jewish characters should know better than to fetishize a Black woman’s hair and the affluent Black Muslim family should know better than to revere Louis Farrakhan in front of the Jewish family and the white guy who co-hosts a podcast about race with a Black woman should know better than to lie about his knowledge of race in front of his fiancee’s Black dad and, not for nothing, the person wearing a Harvard sweatshirt should know better than to mistake Howard College for Harvard.

That’s what I mean by the fact that You People is not an honest movie. It’s a two-hour episode of a 2002 CBS sitcom. Cedric the Entertainer and Max Greenfield’s The Neighborhood is more relevant and funnier than You People, which has no interest in having a real or honest conversation about race. It’s two hours of characters painfully, stupidly sticking their foot in their mouths disguised as a comedy.

It has its moments — Eddie Murphy can’t not go an entire film without being occasionally funny, and part of the reason that Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ character is so awful is because of JLD’s performance — but they don’t make a dent in how otherwise terrible the film is. Amira and Ezra aren’t even a believable couple — they have zero chemistry — so even if their parents weren’t awful, there’s not much incentive to root for their relationship to work. The characters are ignorant, and they wallow in their ignorance, and Jonah Hill and Kenya Barris expect to redeem them in the end with short, superficial speeches that barely even speak to the issues dividing them.

Then, spoiler, months after Ezra and Amira break up because they apparently don’t mean enough to one another to overlook their annoying parents, Shelley and Akbar mend fences between the two families offscreen and throw a surprise wedding for a couple who haven’t spoken to each other in three months! What the hell? I’ve seen hundreds of romantic comedies, and I can tell you this: Surprise weddings are not a thing! It’s a very expensive presumption that gives the marrying couple no decision-making power over the details of the ceremony, which seems like a really bad idea, particularly for a couple fragile enough to break up over a disapproving father and a tone-deaf mother.

It’s bad, and it’s painful to watch (and not in a good way), and I can’t believe Eddie Murphy wasted a relatively rare appearance on this worthless, mostly unwatchable film.