Big Momma’s House

Can a fat 60 year old woman play aggressive basketball, flatten a karate instructor, and dance up a real storm? Can a tough copper in fat woman’s costume cook badly, deliver a baby, sleep celibately with an attractive young woman and arrest a dangerous criminal. Of course they can!

Big Momma’s House is about an undercover policeman called Malcolm (Martin Lawrence) impersonating an obese woman called Big Momma (Ella Mitchell) so that he can spy on suspected felon Sherry (Nia Long). This being a comedy you could probably expect that Malcolm and Sherry would warm to one another and that all will turn out well in the end.

The audience is in on the joke from the start, the story’s progression is obvious and so then it’s just a matter of pulling the strings in the appropriate manner to make this work. For the most part it does.

Director Raja Gosnell knows her way around this territory. She has edited Home Alone and Mrs. Doubtfire, and also directed Home Alone 3 and Never Been Kissed. Martin Lawrence has made his name in Bad Boys, Blue Streak and Life. There are elements of Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Mrs Doubtfire and of course Eddie Murphy’s The Nutty Professor.

The humour gets pretty basic and appropriately funny, with one of the grosses fart jokes we’ve seen for a while, and is an oven glove an appropriate device with which to deliver a baby? Big Momma isn’t big on subtlety.

Big Momma’s House is reasonably short and pretty funny and if you’re not going to get too serious about over weight people being the subject of ridicule, and you’re not after some high faluting cerebral sort of entertainment, then you might as well consider Big Momma’s House worthy of a visit.

2 And A Half Cellulite Thighs