MALIBU’s MOST WANTED
US, 2003, 86 minutes, Colour.
Jamie Kennedy, Taye Diggs, Anthony Anderson, Regina Hall, Blair Underwood, Damien Dante Wayans, Ryan O’ Neal, Bo Derek, Jeffrey Tambor, Kal Penn, Nick Swordson.
Directed by John Whitesell.
Enjoyment of Malibu’s Most Wanted will certainly depend on taste. The director has made some broad comedies including Deck the Hall and two of Martin Lawrence’s Big Momma movies. This one precedes them.
Jamie Kennedy, who is probably an acquired taste, plays the wealthy son of a senator who is campaigning to become governor of California, Ryan O’ Neal with Bo Derek as his wife, actually given very few lines! The flashbacks show that as a child his parents neglected Brad/ B-rad and that he could listen to a great deal of hip-hop, deciding as a teenager to become a hip-hop artist and adopt all the language, mannerisms and swagger of African- American hip-hop artists. He carries on with this throughout the film which is sometimes hard to take even though he puts all his effort into the parody.
He interrupts his father’s campaign, controlled in a very studied manner by Blair Underwood and the staff who want to get rid of the son so that he will not spoil chances of election. His father goes along with a plan, after looking at a commercial done with African- American actors playing basketball and talking about everyone being united. They have trained at drama school, even Carnegie, and agree to payment to impersonate thugs from the hood, to abduct the son and try to pressurise him into dropping all his hip-hop and African- American swagger and become a proper white boy again. They encourage their friend, Shondra, played by Regina Hall to join in the plan.
She approaches B-rad, certainly engages all his sexual attention, and promises to take him to meet Doctor Dre but leads him into the abduction situation. In the meantime, the two actors, Taye Diggs and Anthony Anderson who want to be respectable actors spend some time rehearsing, adopting all the language and mannerisms which they then turn on the unsuspecting victim. taking him to a club and pay the managers to get him up on stage to do a hip-hop routine which ends in disaster when he uses the word “nigger”. He has been warned by Shondra and realises he should have made good his escape – but then he becomes the victim of Shondra’s boyfriend and actual gangsters then try to abduct him. He makes a great sensation by deciding to take a stand, getting the machine guns, on top of the car, firing everywhere and scattering the enemy only to be filmed and appear on television as a white terrorist, alarming his father who then wants to go and rescue his son and reunite with him, alarming the advisers who are fired.
There are confessions all round, the father crashing his truck into the boyfriend’s club and the friends of B-rad, armed with high ammunition, crash into the other side.
Various confrontations, the father accepting his son as his, Shondra getting the money to open beauty salons and there are officially being opened to all kinds of hoopla.
The film is amusing in conception and will depend on the readiness to accept Jamie Kennedy in his role as well as enjoying the supporting cast including Ryan O’ Neill 30 years after Love Story and Bo Derek almost a quarter of a century after 10.
