Getting Lost in Suburbs in ‘Next Friday’

One of my chief regrets of the previous year was that I wasn’t able to get to as many of last August’s Urbanworld Film Festival screenings as I would have liked. Still, the few films I did see at that annual Manhattan-based showcase of African American and Latino movies were enough to convince me that there are sexy, smart and fresh movies by minority filmmakers that, with enough promotion and attention, could find an audience.

Last I checked, those films were still wandering the wilderness in search of distributors. Meanwhile, “Next Friday” gets green-lighted, packaged and shipped into the multiplexes in a relative heartbeat.

Somebody please remind me that this is supposed to be a golden age for movies.

In cold-blooded, capitalistic terms, “Next Friday’s” existence makes perfect sense. It is a follow-up, after all, to the surprise hit (at least in video) “Friday” (1995), which served as a breakthrough for its director, F. Gary Gray, and its hyperbolic comic relief, Chris Tucker, neither of whom is involved in this sequel.

That movie was also something of a breakthrough in the way it used slacker slapstick to deflate “ ‘hood” movie conventions. Add some down-home, after-hours raunchiness to the dopey (in more ways than one) mix, and you have a cult. And some cults, alas, breed offspring.

So it’s now five years later and Craig Jones (writer-producer Ice Cube) still lives at home with his dogcatcher dad (John Witherspoon) and still doesn’t have any prospects for work. There is one prospect that could get Craig out of the house: the jailbreak of Debo (Tommy “Tiny” Lister Jr.), the gargantuan neighborhood bully Craig helped put on ice in the last movie.

Dad thinks it’s a good idea to move Craig to the relative safety of a fancy suburban neighborhood where he can crash with Uncle Elroy (Don “D.C.” Curry), who moved out of South-Central L.A. after winning the lottery. Elroy, putting it gently, is a self-indulgent pig. But his son Day-Day (Michael Epps) works hard to maintain his black BMW. Their neighbors include an elderly Asian woman (Amy Hill), who’s fluent in new-jack jive, and a trio of Latino brothers, guarded by a fierce English bulldog.

Cube (who wanders the movie in a near-incredulous stupor) and director Steve Carr seem content to let things happen to these and other characters. What results is all setup and no follow-through. There is plenty of nasty patter and aimless jokes about hard-core sex, soft-core drugs, dog feces and flatulence to keep you occupied while you wait, in vain, for any reason to laugh out loud. If there’s anything that’s remarkable about “Next Friday,” it’s the way it manages to make Witherspoon, one of the funniest men in America, into a crashing bore.

If there were any justice, “Next Friday” would be the last “Friday.” Somehow, I fear the first weekend grosses will make that unlikely.

* MPAA rating: R for strong language, drug use and sexual content. Times guidelines: raunchy and vulgar throughout.

‘Next Friday’

Ice Cube: Craig Jones

Tommy “Tiny” Lister Jr.: Debo

Michael Epps: Day-Day

Don “D.C.” Curry: Uncle Elroy

John Witherspoon: Dad

New Line Cinema presents a Cubevision Production. Director Steve Carr. Producer Ice Cube. Executive producers Michael Gruber, Claire Rudnick Polstein. Screenplay by Ice Cube, based on characters created by Ice Cube and DJ Pooh. Cinematographer Christopher J. Baffa. Editor Elena Maganini. Music by Terence Blanchard. Costume designer Jacki Roach. Production designer Dina Lipton. Art director Keith Neely. Set designers Christopher S. Nushawg, Susan E. Lomino. Running time: 1 hour, 29 minutes.

In general release.