It seems a bit futile to discuss a Martin Lawrence film in the Gladiators forum because logically, it will just be relegated to a worm working its way from a feline bowel to a desert of clumping crystals, but there’s something to be said for the third incarnation of a character who was hardly funny the first two times she waddled across the silver screen. Big Momma has found her way into a sequel’s sequel: Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son, and to inject a modicum of cleverness into the franchise, they’ve done away with “House” and made the initially possessive “Momma’s” into “Mommas,” thus indicating that there will be twice as much tonnage-filled fun.
Addressing the issue of something once striking devolving to cliché, Salvador Dali once said, “The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot,” suggesting that an original idea can be thought-provoking – whether it be serious, playful, or comical – but imitations of the same idea without expansion or re-imagination become useless and perpetuate silliness and unoriginality.
There have been a number of films that have dealt with the issue of males cross-dressing and have made it rather integral to their respective plots; however, only four come to mind that resemble the “poet” that Dali references: Some Like it Hot, the 1959 crime/comedy that puts Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis is drag to avoid being captured by the mob, Psycho, Hitchcock’s 1960 macabre film that proved we “all go a little mad sometimes,” The Rocky Horror Picture Show, 1975’s cult/musical that will forever make us do the Time Warp at weddings while garbling all words except the chorus, and Tootsie, the 1982 film that nabbed Dustin Hoffman his first Oscar. (Victor Victoria and Les Cages aux Follies get an honorable mention.)
Granted, these four films all played off the plot point of transvestitism, but they were also four different genres, included satirical points, solid actors / actresses, and wove gender-bending into a more prominent storyline that developed characters and an arch that the audience wanted to follow, mostly keeping the actual act of cross-dressing as an additional element in a well-woven tale, as opposed to making it the predominant gimmick.
So, with the wealth of imitators – and according to Wikipedia, Rottentomatoes, and IMDB, there are about two hundred – Big Mommas gets the scorn of the day because it has twice imitated its own ridiculousness that masquerades as comedy. In other words, the original wasn’t funny either. Steeped in sexual innuendo that includes at least two variations of “Is that a flashlight in your pocket?” plus pop culture references that insist Big Momma’s “got game” before she proceeds to school and then dunk on a school yard basketball player as well as her insistence that someone “looks good. Won’t you back that thing up?” Aside from the persistently unfunny fatsuit, posing pop-culture references as dialogue is one step ahead of writing a screenplay by pulling lines out of a hat.
What makes Big Mommas worse is that it’s not even a copy of the original; rather, it’s a copy, again offering a trailer filled with sexual innuendos and slips of the tongue when the cross-dressing duo of Martin Lawrence and Brandon Jackson repeatedly forget they are supposed to be women by noting the “sweet, delicious young women” on a college campus — much like Lawrence lets fly in the original that he could never forget her granddaughter’s “ass…thma.” In all honestly, you’d figure a top FBI agent would not slip in and out of character so easily, and frankly, Lawrence’s verbal dysentary that validates his harrassing of a young woman the first time he meets her makes the character more crude, less funny. I’d love to believe that these Freudian slips offer a social commentary on how men are dogs and are instinctively animals that must hunt the fairer sex, but that provides Lawrence and any of the dozen writers involved in these projects undue credit.
Likewise, Big Mommas kills time with sarcastic pop-culture references like referring to Momma as “Mary J. Bulge.” Zing! But, is this retort even relevant any longer? Couldn’t they have come up with something a bit cleverer? Playing on Mary J. Blige’s name is nearly as anachronistic as calling her the Hindenburg, but not nearly as anachronistic as having Jackson sing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” in a baritone voice that impels Momma to grab his testicles to find that proper soprano tone. Let’s forget about the slave narrative mythology of that song for the moment and move forward to Jackson in a fat suit as he plays a ballerina, which seems only necessary so that he will fly off the stage, crash into the other fat-suit wearing character, and prompt the line: “Now I know why they call it The Nutcracker,” which, if you’re counting, are two nut references in one two-minute trailer.
Maybe I’m a pretentious bastard and unable to appreciate the baser forms of comedy steeped in sexual innuendo and erection-based setups and punchlines, but I’d prefer to think that culture has come further than predictable clichés, and what Big Mommas suggests is that our cumulative intelligence lessens our ability to follow a cohesive story line that interweaves comedy, story, and theme. Too extreme? Maybe, but people will put a few million dollars into this movie through ticket sales, and while I’m sure that the majority of the movie-loving public won’t see this movie, those who do prove there is a market for vapid, banal entertainment. What’s more, the third section of this triptych that proves tragedies come in threes is just one of twenty seven sequels being released this year, five of which are third installments: Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, Madea’s Big Happy Family, Paranormal Activity 3, and Transformers: Dark of the Moon.