Guess Who

A man gets a very big surprise when he meets his prospective son-in-law in this comedy. Percy Jones (Bernie Mac) is the understandably proud father of Theresa (Zoe Saldana), a beautiful and intelligent young woman living in New York City. When Percy learns that his daughter is dating someone and things are getting serious, he decides to do some research, and learns that her beau is a solid businessman. Percy arranges to meet the young man, but is a bit taken aback when he comes face to face with Simon Green (Ashton Kutcher) — Percy and his wife are African-American, and Simon is very, but very Caucasian. When it becomes clear that Simon and Theresa's relationship is likely altar-bound, Percy finds himself suddenly full of misgivings about the young man, especially since Simon tends to get rather clumsy when he's nervous. Guess Who was loosely adapted from the 1967 hit Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, though the race of the prospective father and son have been swapped, and the original film's comic undercurrent has been pushed to the forefront.

AMG Review: At the time Guess Who hit theaters, studios were spitting out ill-conceived remakes at a clip of one per month. Kevin Rodney Sullivan's film bucks that trend in a refreshing way: it revisits only the basic structure of its source material, and there's an actual ongoing relevance to the hot-button issues explored in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Flip-flop the races, sprinkle in believable characters and scenarios, and -- voilà -- a surprise hit (70 million dollars domestic) for two actors with checkered film resumés. The key to Guess Who is that it takes pains to construct a real family at its center, one that's uneasily transformed by this outsider (Ashton Kutcher, whose choppy white-guy haircut is the only thing in the movie that can truly be called "bad"). Sure, Bernie Mac's Percy Jones resembles the grumbling patriarch from the actor's eponymous sitcom, but his relationships with his wife and daughter (the superlative Judith Scott and Zoe Saldana) round him into someone far removed from the sitcom realm. Sullivan and his screenwriters consistently win points by going small and warm, rather than large and mean. Unlike the other prevailing domestic comedies of the day (Meet the Fockers comes to mind), Guess Who rarely allows its set pieces to cross over into slapstick ridiculousness. Unfortunately, one notable exception -- when Mac catches Kutcher trying on lingerie, a bit staged just to throw yuks into the trailer -- may damage the film's chances of being seen by an intelligent audience. A much better and more typical indication of its IQ is the uncomfortable scene in which Simon (Kutcher) gets goaded into reciting racist jokes at the dinner table. Unusually perceptive for a populist comedy, this sequence underscores the fine lines between humor and insult, intimacy and estrangement, and prejudice and understanding.