“This Christmas,” pass the corn please
You can dream of a “white Christmas” or an African-American one, but if you’re making a holiday family-reunion comedy, you can’t have Christmas dinner without the corn.
That’s the message of “This Christmas,” a warm and warmed-over collection of holiday-movie clichés packaged in a movie about a large extended black family.
The Whitfield kids are gathering in the house they grew up in. That’s where Ma Dear (another spelling of “Madea”), their mom (Loretta Devine), holds forth and holds them together. She runs the family dry-cleaning business and tries to keep the peace when her brood comes home to Los Angeles.
The gorgeous Kelli (Sharon Leal) is the college-educated one working in New York advertising. The tough and smart Lisa (Regina King of “Ray,” awesome as always) helps Dear run the dry cleaner and endures being treated like a servant by her cheating businessman-husband (Laz Alonso).
Baby (Chris Brown) is the youngest, a pretty boy with a gift he’s scared to share with Ma Dear. Claude (Columbus Short) is the Marine with a secret or two of his own. Mel (Lauren London) is home from college with her beau (Keith Robinson). And Quentin (Idris Elba) is the prodigal son, the oldest, the one who took up their deserting father’s profession, jazz saxophone.
They gather, some trying to pretend that Joe (Delroy Lindo, splendid) hasn’t lived in sin with their mother the past seven years, feuding over religion, money, old grudges and marriage.
Crossover writer-director Preston A. Whitmore II runs all these overused holiday situations through an African-American filter. He pauses for songs, cuts holiday montages to Christmas pop and recycles jokes from Bill Cosby and others. What we have is a Tyler Perry comedy without the sassy snap, “The Cosby Show” without Bill - which is another way of saying that there’s nothing new under this tree “This Christmas.”