Movie review: Jumping the Broom ***

Jumping the Broom ***

Stars: Angela Bassett, Paula Patton, Loretta Devine, Laz Alonso
Director: Salim Akil
Rated: PG-13
Showing: Neptune Cinema week of Friday, May 27 - daily at 7pm except Saturday 6pm; Sunday 2:30pm. For more information about film times, call 292-7296.
Tickets: Buy tickets online
Runtime: 101 minutes
Comedy

Two very different African-American families are brought together by a wedding in this culture-clash comedy, about a downtown boy who falls in love with an uptown girl.

Sabrina (Paula Patton, Precious) is a pampered young corporate lawyer who meets Wall Street up-and-comer Jason (Laz Alonso, Avatar) when she hits him with her car.

It’s love at first sight and the pair gets engaged after a whirlwind romance.

They decide to tie the knot at her family’s mansion in Martha’s Vineyard and her bourgeois clan opens their doors for his blue-collar relatives from Brooklyn.

But the differences in their socio-economic backgrounds and the contrast in class means they are far from one big happy family.

Jason’s loud-mouthed and temperamental mom Pam (Loretta Devine, For Coloured Girls) and Sabrina’s snobby mother Claudine (Angela Bassett, Malcolm X) clash from the start and their feud is the central plot of the movie.

A major issue is Pam’s insistence the couple ‘jump the broom’ at the ceremony.

During an impassioned speech at the rehearsal dinner, she explains the tradition’s roots in slavery, when the ceremony was used to recognize a marriage between people who were not legally allowed to wed. But Claudine says her ancestors were not slaves, they owned slaves — inflaming her new in-laws’ dislike.

The movie shares Claudine’s pretensions and portrays the urban working class characters as crass, rude and uneducated.

The exception is Jason but he seems weak for failing to protect his fiancée from his vile mother, whose hatred is never really explained.

The excellent cast do their best but the characters are two-dimensional and the culture-clash storyline has been done before.

Watch if you liked: Our Family Wedding.