Guess Who must have sounded brilliant to whichever movie executive greenlighted it: an update of the 1967 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, in which a white girl brings home her black boyfriend to meet her parents, except — get this! — in this version it’s a black girl bringing home her white boyfriend! And it’s a comedy! And the title is shorter!
Basically, what all that means is that the force of the original has been dissipated — and not because the racial issues that spurred it have gone away. A remake with the racial roles as they were in 1967 would still spark discomfort today, I’m sure. But, this way, you get Ashton Kutcher as the white boy in question and funnyman Bernie Mac as the black dad who’s not at all sure about him. For most American moviegoers, I suspect, it will immediately seem absurd that any family would reject cute Kutcher as a son-in-law, hence instant comedy with Mac’s character set up to fail, and the implied moral equivalence of white versus black racial perceptions is rather tasteless. One group used to be oppressed, remember?
At any rate, much of Guess Who will be familiar; there does not appear to be any new jokes in Hollywood. It is very reliant on the stupid sitcom situation in which someone has to tell a lame lie or make some kind of stuttering excuse. Often the script seems designed simply to get us to the next joke or ”plot point”, rather than trying to make sense of the people involved. Contrived complications keep things moving, and of course there’s a major schmaltz-injection toward the end.
But perhaps asking any more of Guess Who is asking too much. Within its own unambitious paradigm, it is at least reasonably funny. Kutcher and Mac have genuine comic talent, especially when bumping up against each other, and that’s what shines through the predictable formulae.