Bringing Down The House (tbc)

When bad comedies happen to good comedians: Vol 4,537.

No surprise, really. Just look at the recipe: take a choreographer-turned-director (Adam Shankman) with fatally poor timing. Add a lame, back-of-envelope script (originally called Jailbabe.com, and not markedly improved since then) from tyro screenwriter Jason Filardi. Toss in some stale, sub-sitcom culture-clash set-ups (black-on-white catfights! Joan Plowright smoking pot in the 'hood!) and ladle on cringesome minstrel-show-era racial 'humour' with a nasty edge that speaks volumes.

By this point even Steve Martin, who shows flashes of former glories, and Queen Latifah, gamely wrestling with the embarrassment factor, can't save Bringing Down The House. But then this is the tale of an uptight 'honky' (cough) lawyer learning to jive talk (!), dance (!!) and save his marriage at the hands of a plain-talkin', home-truth-dispensin' escaped convict.

Thank God, then, for Eugene Levy as Martin's legal sidekick. Stealing a movie for the umpteenth time in the last few years, he saves the day with his elegant, underplayed suave-nerd role, improbably wooing Queen Latifah's Charlene with deadpan lust, one raised furry eyebrow and made-up ghetto talk.

DVD Extras:

Decidedly mixed but by no means stingy. The 15-minute Making Of documentary may be the usual feel-the-love puffery spread among its oddly enthusiastic major players, but at least it shows off Queen Latifah's shrewd, articulate humour to better advantage. An inadvertently wistful gag reel, on the other hand, just shows up the paucity of really good jokes, while the average deleted scenes merely highlight how House was once, maybe, a more coherent film.On the plus side, the gabby audio commentary by Shankman and Filardi is an inadvertent classic of pure camp exuberance ("Best of all, the house we filmed in was next door to the one that starred in What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?!") and The Godfather Of Hop mockumentary is worth a laugh or two. Yes, it's self-indulgent, but who could resist Levy straightfacedly posited as rap's unseen (and Canadian) Mr Big?

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