You People (2023)

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It’s only January but we already have a contender for the inevitable worst-of 2023 lists with Kenya Barris’ You People, yet another turgid, systematically unfunny “comedy” released by Netflix coming just a few months after last year’s wretched Me Time, demonstrating once again the streaming giant will produce just about anything so long as it ticks the right boxes.

The pitch must’ve sounded great: Eddie Murphy, Jonah Hill and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in an R-rated comedy about modern race relations? That’s exactly what we need in these comedically stifling times, and who better than Murphy with a return to foul-mouthed funny after decades making family-friendly drivel? Sadly, we get none of that. Instead, You People is a never-ending series of poorly constructed and poorly delivered lectures on race and self-victimization by actors who should have known better.

Much has been made of this film’s, ahem, homage to Stanley Kramer’s 1967 classic Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, which was so well-intentioned and saccharine sweet it’s easy to forgive its clumsiness at navigating what were, at the time, deeply painful dynamics of interracial romance. You can forget all that with You People, a production so profoundly hateful and mean-spirited it makes 2005’s Bernie Mac / Ashton Kutcher starring Guess Who remake seem like Citizen Kane by comparison.

The setup is familiar: Ezra (Jonah Hill), white, is co-host of a podcast focusing on black-culture in love with Amira (Lauren London), a black fashion designer struggling to make it. They have an unexpected meet-cute resulting from Ezra mistaking her for an Uber driver, an innocent mistake Amira immediately calls racist and condemns Ezra for his white privilege. Thus begins an alleged comedy overflowing overflowing with racist subtext, like a toilet.

Which is a shame as there was potential in the concept, a chance for everyone involved to let off some steam while addressing some of the often overlooked (or underseen) cultural elephants in the room. What You People does, or attempts, is to introduce further irritants to the Guess Who formula by making the white family Jewish, albeit superficially so, and the black family Muslim, albeit militantly so. Unfortunately, Kenya Barris seems more interested in taking sides and lectures than he does making jokes. Are you laughing yet?

The couple introduce their parents to one another: Ezra’s mom Shelley (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and dad Arnold (David Duchovny) to Amira’s dad Akbar (Eddie Murphy) and mom Fatima (Nia Long), and it’s not long before cultural sparks fly. Ezra’s parents are nominally Jewish, evidenced by their attending synagogue and talk of yarmulkes. Akbar is a fully radicalized Muslim, complete with a kufi (and antisemitism) gifted by none other than the honorable Louis Farrakhan himself.

The only time where this dynamic ever comes up is the required dinner scene when both families are forced to confront each other’s unconscious (and sometimes conscious) bias and prejudices, though here the differences are overt and intentional. A back and forth over what historical tragedy was worse, slavery or the Holocaust, offered a glimpse into what might have been.

Alas, Barris isn’t interested, or capable, of finding the comedy of errors in these moments, or even pressure-deflating humor. Akbar’s extremism is never played for laughs but with deadly seriousness, his antisemitic and racist comments delivered to sermonize and hurt. Even when his exaggerated bravado is called out it’s never deconstructed as the silliness it clearly is. His anger over a gentrified juice bar is actually funny, even if the film doesn’t know it.

Contrast this with how Shelley and Arnold’s cluelessness trying to navigate the murkiness of their offspring’s interracial / intercultural relationship is played at their expense, the audience directed to laugh at (not with) them while cheering on Akbar and Fatima’s seething disgust. Every misunderstanding is an affront, hurtful and insensitive. Ezra and his mother issue mea culpas for over-exaggerated slights, getting trapped in nonsensical logic-traps they can never hope to get out of. Hearing Louis-Dreyfus “apologize on behalf of all white people” during what should have been a sweet reconciliation with absolute seriousness is degrading.

There are zero efforts at having Amira or Akbar learning to accept Jewish culture, everything engineered to stimulate ‘white guilt’ to launch yet another treatise on racial grievances and slights. Akbar is never “made” to apologize for his antisemitism and racism, just his behavior over the way he mistreats Ezra. This is a huge difference.

It’s a shame Murphy would choose to appear in a clunker that expands the worst elements of his ill-advised Coming 2 America sequel, though he’s made terrible choices in the past. I suspect it’s Netflix money, or maybe he felt the material had potential. It’s wild the same man who ate scenery in 48 Hours and Beverly Hills Cop (hell, even Shrek) would turn in such a lazy, zero-energy performance. It’s also baffling why Julia Louis-Dreyfus, one of the most talented and genuinely funny people in TV history, keeps letting her talents go to waste in these throwaway films (you’d be forgiven for forgetting she’s a key player in the current MCU phase).

What’s most tragic is how blindingly obvious a subversive, genuinely funny comedy could have been constructed around Shelley and Akbar’s mismatched parental characters instead of their charismatically-challenged offspring. We get a taste of what-might-have been with their Parent Trap-style shenanigans towards the inevitable conclusion, only to realize after it’s too late that we’re seeing two impossibly funny people slumming it.

The cast is mostly forgettable, even the two leads, though it’s a shame about poor David Duchovny, coming off another disastrously bad comedy with last year’s The Bubble (also Netflix, of course), whose sole reason for being here to buffoon himself with low-rent jokes about the rapper Xzibit.

Most of the blame should go to writer/director Kenya Barris, creator of the Black-ish universe, who’s crafted a visually and thematically ugly production. While I understand Barris found his niche early with black-centric comedy, that’s no excuse for bad filmmaking. You People looks like a badly filmed television comedy with poor lighting and haphazard editing, even by Netflix’s notoriously pancake-flat output. So much dialogue is ADR (that never bothers to match the footage) that it’s obvious much work was done in the editing room to Frankenstein this hot mess together.

Underlying everything is one of the worst scripts ever inflicted on a so-called comedy, which both Kenya Barris and Jonah Hill share credit (or blame). Nearly every line of dialogue is racialized politics, or racialized speeches, or racialized misunderstandings, or racialized observations past the point of madness. None of which is clever, illuminating, or even subversive. It never stops. It’s suffocating.

Barris and Hill almost never trust or allow their characters to be human, instead forcing them to recite hackneyed diatribes and justifications for their own racism as though what’s coming out of their mouths is some form of revolutionary protest. Why does everyone living in a major urbanized metropolitan city act like they’re just now meeting other races and cultures for the first time? What year is this supposed to take place in?

If You People hadn’t featured Eddie Murphy I’m convinced zero people would be talking about it, let alone excited to watch it. Like most Netflix content it’s a film designed by algorithm and made by people who exist either exclusively on social media or within their own self-contained bubbles far removed from the real world. It’s farcical decades after Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles or even Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle ignorance like this being produced. To paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, the movie isn’t offensive because it’s racist; it’s offensive because it’s just not funny.