The Honeymooners
One Star
by Norman Wilner, Zap2it.com
"The Honeymooners" takes Jackie Gleason's beloved, quintessential 1950s sitcom and brings it into the present day -- with a predominantly black cast -- and whaddaya know, it's still a sitcom.
The color switch doesn't make much difference to Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton; now, instead of spending all their time talking about sports, they take the occasional break to riff on Beyonci's rear end.
Ralph and Ed are played by Cedric the Entertainer and Mike Epps, whose comic styles are a natural fit for the characters: Cedric's slow-burning intensity suits Kramden's flop-sweat bluster just fine, while Epps' confident uselessness is more or less Norton in a nutshell. And Gabrielle Union and Regina King have proven themselves to be able comic performers, as well as solid actors -- never mind that Jamie Foxx guy, King burned a hole in the screen as his long-suffering mistress in "Ray."
The casting would be appreciated if "The Honeymooners" worked for even a second. There's just no life to it; instead of building its jokes in waves, as the TV series did, it just stumbles through a collection of gags and premises lifted from the show. The script, credited to four writers, barely seems to exist outside of the odd reference to Y2K and thongs; all the good lines have obviously been improvised by the actors.
Eric Stoltz and John Leguizamo turn up as a gleefully amoral developer and an entirely disreputable trainer of greyhounds, respectively. They steal every last one of their scenes, in completely different ways: Leguizamo turns his manic hustle up to 11, and Stoltz by not appearing to understand what movie he's wandered into.
Paramount's full-frame DVD offers a reasonable selection of extras. There's an audio commentary by Cedric, Epps and director John Schultz (although Epps bails on the session about halfway through, claiming his mother-in-law is in town); a generic production featurette where everyone talks about how much they love the original TV series, despite the fact that they're defiling its memory; six deleted scenes with optional Schultz commentary, the theatrical trailer and a couple of TV spots billed as "interstitials." We understand the marketing department's impulse to find new ways to pretty up the sell, but come on, guys ... don't treat us like dopes over here.
