REVIEWED - GUESS WHO: Guess Who is a toothless but charming reverse racial remake of a liberal '60s warhorse, writes Michael Dwyer
Regarded as a liberal landmark in its day, Stanley Kramer's 1967 message movie, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, featured the incomparable team of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in their ninth and final film together, as a couple whose progressive values are tested when their only daughter (Katharine Houghton) introduces them to her black-but-brilliant fiance (Sidney Poitier). The movie earned Hepburn the second of her four Oscars as best actress and took the Oscar for best screenplay.
That storyline gets a racial twist in the new comedy Guess Who, which seems unlikely to figure in next year's awards. Bernie Mac plays Percy, a bank loans officer living in suburban New Jersey comfort with his wife, Marilyn (Judith Scott), as they prepare to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary.
Their elder daughter, Theresa (Zoe Saldana) is bringing home her new boyfriend, Simon (Ashton Kutcher), but her doting dad doesn't know until he meets him that Simon, a Wall Street stockbroker, is white.
Ultimately, the set-up is much closer to Meet the Parents than the movie from which Guess Who takes its title. Director Kevin Rodney Sullivan (who made Barbershop 2) is altogether less interested in moralising than in playing the race issue for laughs - though bordering on the daring in one sequence where Percy pushes Simon to tell one ethnic joke after another until the white boy oversteps the mark.
The prospect of Mac and Kutcher in roles originally played by the far more accomplished Tracy and Poitier seemed doomed to failure, but both are commendably restrained, Mac even realising that less is more, especially when it comes to widening and rolling his bulbous eyes.
The movie paints both men as fairly dim, stubbornly proud and deluded by macho posturing, while all the women in the movie are strong, sassy and sensible, the personifications of wisdom. However, the chemistry between Mac and Kutcher becomes surprisingly winning when, despite the initial mutual antagonism between Percy and Simon and their ability to bring out the worst in each other, they eventually begin to bond and Simon even coaches Percy in dancing a tango.
Even more surprising is the consistently good-humoured and sweet-natured tone of the movie. Light and slight as it is, Guess Who proves disarmingly appealing and breezily paced all the way towards its de rigueur feel-good finale.
