#BigMommasLikeFatherLikeSon

[adamwatchesmovies]

Big Mommas Like Father Like Son (2011)

Did I really see Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son twice in one month? What kind of monster have I become? This is one bad movie, but as far as an installment of the cross-dressing comedy trilogy, it might be the best of the bunch by being so undeniably atrocious. It’s ridiculous, contrived, poorly written, not particularly funny, and frequently puzzling. At least it’s never boring.

FBI agent Malcolm Turner (Martin Lawrence) and his son Trent (Brandon T. Jackson) witness a murder at the hands of Russian mobster Chirkoff (Tony Curran). While they look for a flash drive that contains evidence to put him away, they are forced to go undercover as women at the Georgia Girls School for the Arts.

It's almost admirable the way this movie has to be seen to be believed. It’s like an essay on a historical figure done without any research and written on the morning it was due. Not only is the paper oriented in landscape instead of portrait, but the copy is centered, the font is 16 points in size and there’s a large photo taken straight from Wikipedia at the top. It’s almost better than something that tries and fails.

The biggest disappointment with Big Mommas House 2 was that with our protagonist married and happily anticipating a kid (the pregnancy isn't mentioned but I could've sworn that was a thing...) there weren’t as many cross-dressing shenanigans. Here, we get ALL OF THEM. It’s a double bill of men dressed as women. You get Big Momma being hit on by an extremely clingy horny guy while Trent as Charmaine constantly slips and yells “Damn!” at the hot co-eds at this... high school? College? It's unclear. On the one hand, they have dorms and nude models in art class. On the other, Trent is clearly described as underage (Despite the actor playing him being 26 at the time) and they offer beginner’s driving lessons. This film is already starting to fall apart and we haven’t even started examining it!

Like Father, Like Son is utter desperation. it's padded out with several musical numbers that come out of nowhere. I’m not talking about brief numbers either. We hear close to the entirety of Ke$ha’s Tick Tock, complete with impromptu choreographed dancing from the students. The plot with the Russian Mob? an afterthought. It’s simply an excuse for our two heroes to go undercover. Some plot points in that story never even get resolved. The supposed leak in the FBI for example. We never find out what that mole was. Did director John Whiteshell think we wouldn't pay attention? I’ve scrutinized this film to infinity; no detail has escaped me.

I don’t think anyone sitting down with this film expected it to be good (and if you did, I hope some day they manage to surgically remove that pick-ax from your skull). Nonetheless, it takes a lot of bravery to suck this much, and in public. I laughed frequently at Big Mommas House 3. Never in the way that it was intended for me to laugh, but I couldn’t help it. You can’t make a travesty like Big Mommas Like Father, Like Son on purpose, and that makes it fascinating. (Extended Version on DVD, June 3, 2016)