The colour of scandal

Steve Martin is an uptight tax lawyer who finds that his legal online chat-room correspondent isn't the slim blonde he has been led to believe, but the huge black lady who moves like two potato sacks on top of each other and talks like a public address system - Queen Latifah.

She soon moves in on his home life, scandalises the people nextdoor ("I thought I heard Negro," says his neighbour), creates a scene in his posh golf club and nearly wrecks the deal that he is cutting with a rich, old dame (Joan Plowright) who wears five strings of pearls and walks a bulldog called Shakespeare dressed in an Elizabethan ruff.

It's quite a mess, this catastrophe - a racially offensive mess, too. The idea seems to be that white folks thrive better not only because they are taught "respect" for blacks by the latter making embarrassing scenes in public, but also because they learn to behave like blacks, talk like blacks, and generally conduct themselves in an anti-social manner popularly used to stereotype blacks.

To see Martin in shapeless homeboy outfit, talking "homie" in falsetto pitch and doing hiphop dancing, and Joan Plowright

getting stoned on a joint, is to witness usually sophisticated performers making discomforting asses of themselves.

Queen Latifah comes on like an animated double mattress, smothering Martin every time he gets too close. If she imagines that this crass caricature of African-American manners represents her race's hang-loose liberation, she should have studied the script more closely: the plot keeps passing her off as Martin's nanny, housemaid or cook, all the traditional occupations of slavery.

Eugene Levy usually manages to preserve his dignity even while playing the father in Farrelly Brothers' gross-out comedies. But here he loses all of it as a Jewish lawyer infatuated with Latifah and showing his devotion by having his hair plaited cornrow style.

Bringing Down The House
Cert: cert12A