Stay away Roscoe Jenkins

By Dan Moore

Published Feb. 15, 2008

“Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins” is a startlingly incompetent movie, something like watching your friend misspell his own name or join the 9/11 Truth Movement. At every turn you think to yourself: “No, they won’t do that! That’s too dumb for professional filmmakers, even bad ones!” But in 114 minutes writer/director Malcolm D. Lee manages to establish new lows in audience expectations.

Martin Lawrence, who has never made a good film and is not about to start today, is Roscoe Jenkins, a bizarre composite of Dr. Phil and Maury. He’s engaged to Bianca (Joy Bryant), a “Survivor” winner, and together they promote a pop-psychology phenomenon entitled “The Team of Me.”

Naturally, he is about to receive a comeuppance, and it comes at the hands of his down-home family, who destroyed his self-confidence when he was young. But the breadth of violence and failure delivered to our protagonist in the name of family comedy and wacky hijinks is so overblown it’s disquieting, so slapstick it makes its audience uncomfortable. Roscoe belongs to the Ben Stiller school of comedic protagonists; the movie despises him. He has no redeeming qualities. He’s hectored constantly by his family and physically abused throughout.

Watch as he neglects his son, gets beaten in a fistfight with his obese sister, destroys the house and covers everyone in pie while playing craps, facilitates a dog rape and gives his mother a concussion. In a misguided effort to stretch the lesson du jour — family first at all costs! — over the course of so overlong a movie, Roscoe ends up alienating nearly everyone and causing thousands of dollars in damage to the Jenkins household.

Even given this running time Lee is unable to end the movie without resorting to that hoariest of family comedy tropes: the big reunion speech. As nobody involved in the film has any idea of the stakes they’ve established, that simple, dumb speech somehow covers for the absurd destruction of the film’s first 100 minutes.

Lee seems to want to say something substantive about these sketchy West Coast characters, Roscoe and his wife, but he is either too busy beating the crap out of his protagonist to bother or too dim-witted to actually go through with it. The signs of incompetence highlight themselves throughout. We’re given no actual sense of family, no real continuity. At one point, in a scene emblematic of the disconnect this movie has with reality, Roscoe’s wife walks onto the airplane just holding her dog, which proceeds to wreak havoc. Why did no one catch this? Because FAA regulations are secondary, in this film, to the primary goal of ruining Roscoe Jenkins’s clothes.

Now, I am no expert on filmmaking or airplanes, but having been on an airplane and seen a film, I was able to puzzle that one out. That Malcolm D. Lee, who is no filmmaking rookie, made a mistake of that magnitude makes it difficult for me to believe that he doesn’t have trouble with that second L sometimes. “Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins” is that kind of film.