DEATH AT A FUNERAL remake looks even worse than the original

The original Frank Oz-directed Death At A Funeral was a mixed bag of lame jokes and contrived situations delivered by a pretty good UK cast. It wasn’t great, it wasn’t terrible, it was in that horrible zone in between, hovering around ‘average.’ And it came out two years ago.

So now, out of the blue, we get an “African-Americanised” remake of the original, headlined by the likes of Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence, and Danny Glover. I have a hard enough time coming to terms with race relations in America without this kind of bizarre stunt muddling my comprehension even more. Why do we get distinctly and obviously “us” vs “them” movies like this? I suppose it makes sense plot-wise, because if an elderly black man died then his family would come to the funeral, and his family would almost certainly be mostly black. But that doesn’t answer the question: why the hell do we even need this?

But then there’s the line towards the end of the trailer, commenting on the race of the dwarf (a role Peter Dinklage reprises to the excitement of no-one). If a white person in a movie complained that their father had been having sex with a black person, it would be edgy–borderline racist. But when Martin Lawrence and Chris Rock shriek jokes like this, it’s funny. Shouldn’t the same rules apply to anyone, regardless of sex, gender, race, culture, etc.? Isn’t that what civil rights and equality are about?

And if a movie wasn’t funny enough for you, why take the original film and re-shoot it shot for shot with different actors? I know that a lot of Americans prefer their own homegrown humour to that from across the pond, but the black (colour, not race) humour that laced the original was distinctly British–why not change scenes and situations to reflect the change in culture and geography, instead of finding an identical set and location and shooting the same script with the occasional “Daaaayum” thrown in?

It’s insulting to the original film, it’s insulting to the British, it’s insulting to Americans, and most of all it’s insulting to black Americans. It’s like bribing the African-American demographic into feeling like they have to watch the movie just because it has some of “their” icons in it; it’s like saying “you probably didn’t get the jokes in the first one because the people saying them were white and had funny accents, so we remade it with people who represent your culture, and whom you are therefore obliged to support.”

If the poms remade Bad Boys as a London-set flick starring Jason Statham and Daniel Craig, not only would the movie suck, but the black community would be rightfully annoyed–representatives of a specific culture taken and hollowed out and replaced with icons of another. And this never needed to happen–the movie’s been out on DVD for something like eighteen months. Just watch that one, it’s got the same plot, for crying out loud, and comes with 97% less Chris Rock shrieking.

If you laugh at any point during this trailer, you laughed more times than I did.

Death At A Funeral is due April 16, 2010 stateside, 4 May in the UK. Other territories release dates are yet to be announced.