REVIEWED - BIG MOMMA'S HOUSE 2: REAFFIRMING the maxim that there is no accounting for taste, the lazy and witless Big Momma's House 2 made over $27 million at the US box-office on its opening weekend last month. However, if a recycled Mrs Doubtfire starring Martin Lawrence in drag as cinema's world's fattest action hero gets you rolling in the aisles, this one's for you.
Lawrence reprises his role as undercover FBI agent Malcolm Turner from Big Momma's House (2000), which is now most notable as a footnote in the careers of Terrence Howard and Paul Giamatti, both of them Oscar nominees this month. Neither actor features in the sequel, in which Turner has married the federal witness (Nia Long) he was protecting in the first film.
Taking a desk job as the birth of their first child nears, Turner is drawn back into action - and fat suit - when a colleague is killed while investigating a computer worm that could play havoc with the US security system. In his Big Momma disguise, Turner gets a job as a nanny to the children of one of the suspects (Mark Moses from Desperate Housewives) and his prissy wife (Emily Procter from CSI: Miami). The children are a teen goth, an unconfident cheerleader, and a small boy who eats Brillo pads, throws himself from great heights without injuring himself, and never speaks.
The movie is laced with syrupy moralising as Big Momma becomes the caring surrogate parent the neglected children need, but the screenplay is hopelessly short on the humour it so badly needs to work as comedy. It builds to a gross parody of Bo Derek's beach sequence from 10, as Big Momma dons an XXXXL-sized yellow swimsuit and runs along the sand while her layers of fat wobble in slow motion.
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