This didn’t bring down my house in the least, but it certainly brought down my opinion of Steve Martin, Queen Latifah and Joan Plowright’s judgement. Yes, I am a self-confessed Steve Martin fan, a confession that may ostracize me from my fellow CoP reviewers, but I can’t help it. I admit he’s appeared in some bad films in his career before, but this piece of unfunny, predictable, racist trash really takes the cherry!

It’s a rehash of the old “poor black person enters the rich white world” scenario and the stereotypes are out in numbers. Steve Martin is Peter, a well-to-do, divorced tax lawyer who ends up on a blind date with Charlene (Queen Latifah) via an internet-chat. He is expecting her to be a thin, blonde, white attorney which she obviously isn’t. She turns out to be a convicted felon who claims she was set up and wants him to help her clear her name.

The issue of whether or not she’s innocent evaporates until the last 15 minutes of the film and the characters spend the rest of the time making fools of themselves. The tagline to the movie is: Everything he needed to know about life, she learned in prison.. Predictably, Peter gets loosen-up lessons from Charlene and learns to like her invasion of his life, Charlene is of course completely innocent and Joan Plowright plays a wealthy heiress who reminisces about her “negro nanny’s spiritual: Are You Gonna sell Me Ma’am?” but is cured of her racism when she shares a joint with some ‘brothers’.

I sniggered a couple of times, admittedly, usually thanks to Steve Martin’s performance (he does look awfully silly trying to breakdance dressed as a home boy), but on the whole I spent the duration of the film wondering if what they were doing and saying was really as stupid and rascist as I thought it was or if I was missing something. The black and white characters in this film are so polarized and simplistic: all the black people are criminal ‘home boyz/girlz’ and all the white people are rich, stuck up and narrow-minded. We are supposed to like Steve Martin’s character, yet there he is, ushering Latifah into his house so his outspoken racist neighbour (Betty White) won’t see that he is associating with a black woman.

I had a go at such stereotypes in Far From From Heaven. Believe me, this is ten times worse! To top it off, Queen Latifah is one of the executive producers of Bringing Down The House, so I am baffled: why did she have this film made? Perhaps she had a brain reduction instead of a breast reduction.

* 1/2 out of 5