Lady Madonna in The Best Man (1999)

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The Best Man is a fairly limp ‘talking heads’ film about an author who uses a past indiscretion to load his debut novel, only to have the thing read by all his friends just before one of them is to be married. And therein lies the rub – if you boffed your best bud’s girl in college, would you let him in on your dirty little secret by publishing it in book format just before they’re to be married? Not if you have a brain in your head, yet that’s the dilemma in The Best Man, written and directed by Spike Lee’s cousin, Malcolm Lee. Whether Cousin Malcy got his start as a result of nepotism or talent, the lack of any empathy an audience can have with these characters rests at his feet.

Harper (Taye Diggs) is our lead but he seems to have a lot of trouble telling the truth, unless it’s in writing, in which case he can’t stop telling the truth. His girl, Robin (Sanaa Lathan) has about as much appeal as colonic irrigation – even if she could maybe give you some pleasure, it’d be the kind of pleasure that leaves you walking tender for a day or two. And then there’s Harper’s pals, a mix of snarky asshole (Terrence Dashon Howard), wimpy she-male (Harold Perrineau Jr) and brooding, bragging man-ape (Morris Chestnut). Which leaves us with only one person left to truly enthuse in – driven TV executive Jordan (Nia Long) – a woman who would gladly commit adultery just to get a little of what she missed out on at college.

Is the point here that everyone in society is despicable? If it is, then The Best Man achieves. But if the point here is that these people all have something special about them, it’s well lost in a sea of whiter than white black men, simple-minded and/or bitchy black women and about as much appeal amongst black audiences as an anthology of Amos and Andy episodes. These people are so successful despite themselves that you could almost have called them the Bush family, yet they’re so preppy and ‘yupped out’ that even Bryant Gumble himself would be hard-pressed to relate. These people are about as realistic as The Muppets. In space.

So as long as we’re not going to actually empathize with anyone in the cast, the very least we can get out of this is a little nudity, right? Well, nearly. Apart from one scene with Nia Long walking about in a purple teddy, the only other flesh on offer comes in the guise of a bachelor party stripper scene, which for some reason stops very short of any actual stripping. In fact, The Best Man has all the sexual intrigue of a Snoop Dogg music video, featuring copious amounts of shaking booty and gyrating of hips but not a lot of anything you couldn’t see in a Bowflex infomercial.

Look, this is far from an unwatchable flick but it’s also far from as good as you’d expect it to be and drifts way over into Prettyville where folks like you and me are never allowed entry. You know Prettyville, don’t you? It’s where the cast of FRIENDS can afford a Manhattan apartment that could fit seven people even though they work in crappy low paying jobs. Prettyville is where everybody is a football star and nobody is ever just a benchwarmer. It’s where you can go swimming and come out of the water with your hair perfectly in place. It’s where you don’t actually need to work for a living, you can just be cool and all your bills are taken care of. Prettyville is where black women get high paying TV jobs. Prettyville is where you don’t just write your first book, you write a bestseller that Oprah wants to put on her Book of the Month club. Ya dig?

When it comes right down to it, The Best Man isn’t exciting, it isn’t poignant and the lessons learned in the end aren’t particularly worth learning. It’s a lot of beautiful people getting angry at other beautiful people, then deciding they want to have sex with them, then backslapping their way through a happy ending, complete with a dance number. In a word, bollocks.

Nudity report: If there were one element of The Best Man that is undoubtedly fine, that element would be Nia Long. No, she’s not particularly that outstanding of an actress but she is most assuredly fun to look at, especially in a moose-knuckle covering purple teddy that could conjure an erection out of a concrete monk. Wanna see? Get a Mr. Skin membership and take a look for yourself.

Ratings: Berardinelli: 3/4, Apollo Guide: 77/100, Amazon: 4.6/5.


Written by: OZ: 2/5