Big mommas: Like father like son

WHEN THE teenage son of FBI operative Malcolm Turner (Martin Lawrence) witnesses a gangland murder, the beleaguered agent is left with little option but to get back in fat-drag for the third instalment of the hit franchise.

Assuming the role of the eponymous matriarch, Malcolm makes for the mall to find suitable girly attire for Junior; the youngster, in turn, is transformed into “Charmaine Daisy Pierce”. Those villainous Russian mobsters will never think to look for the Turners at an all-girl school for the performing arts, right?

For too long, an elite cabal of white, patriarchal interests has dismissed the transgressive comedy of Martin Lawrence as farcical or intellectually deficient. Among philistines and uneducated oiks, the Big Momma’s series, in particular, has repeatedly borne the brunt of historical-materialist ire.

For these people, Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Sonwill look like just another morbidly obese cross-dressing confection. Their crass, unyielding minds will fail to notice the poster campaign decrying genital mutilation, honour killings and forced prostitution that appears behind Charmaine during "her" first rap recital. They will similarly choose to ignore the film's radical reimagining of the bourgeois family unit as proudly transgendered, class defiant and boldly black.

The film-makers, meanwhile, push a pluralist, postmodern agenda to a daring extreme. Why bother with a "new" plot when one can simply borrow one from Some Like It Hot?Why write "new" material when one can repeatedly deconstruct the act of falling over? Suddenly, Witten's derivation of knot invariants – even the Jones polynomial! – seem like inadequate metaphors for our post-Lacanian understanding of the interconnectedness between psychological relativism and physical "realities".

Big Momma, in turn, is the personification of what Edward Said and Julia Kristeva meant when they wrote about “otherness”. Overweight, African-American, borderline psychotic and between genders, the titular heroine’s folksy wisdom and charm – “Whoops, there it is!” – reconnect the viewer to a lost evolutionary Mesopotamian history while offering a radical new blueprint for black liberation hermeneutics.

Well, either that or it's just a bunch of dumbass frocked jock shizzle. TARA BRADY