Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins: Critic Reviews

If you thought National Lampoon's Vacation films were at least okay, then Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins is a decent enough way to spend two hours.

It's a cut above other films of its type because every scene is packed with...touches that suggest that the filma(TM)s writer and director, Malcolm D. Lee, is working overtime to smuggle life into formula.

There's little to distinguish this oddly mean-spirited comedy.

A talented comedian, Lawrence has leaned all too easily on formula for his successful films. Imagine if he would test his flair against original and fresh premises, instead of the tried and trite.

The movie hurts.

Spiking sentimental family values with crude hilarity isn't the recipe for an award winner.

The movie ditches clever for crass: Mo'nique and Mike Epps, as opportunistic cousin Reggie, provide most of the downhome and dirty entendres. Less 'nique would have fixed much of what ails this movie.

There are a lot of outrageous, raunchy, and insulting comments from caricatured family members, but, surprisingly, considering that most of them are played by stand-up comics, very few actual jokes.

Writer/director Malcolm D. Lee delivers a relatable comedy that drops viewers off in this family that just happens to be African-American.

A few laughs and a lot of hyperbolic shtick make this a little better than formulaic before the standard-issue resolution.

Roscoe Jenkins labors too hard to wring too-few chuckles.

Modestly budgeted and massively dumb, Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins belongs to the sassy sistas and blinged-out playas school of comedy (maybe it's a preschool, come to think of it).

A large, talented cast is mostly wasted in Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins, one of those movies Hollywood cranks out to celebrate the down-home charms of small town life by exposing the vapidity of showbiz and celebrity.

Roscoe Jenkins works best when it aims lowest.

An in-your-face double helping of fat jokes, crude slapstick, wacky Southern-black stereotypes and occasionally inspired improv.

Possible signs of the apocalypse: a rain of fire, return of the Messiah, my enjoy ing a Martin Lawrence comedy.

Hollywood, which spent most of the last century ignoring the black family, seems determined to spend most of this one showing the same black family. Over and over.

Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins reinforces the sense that movies are not about real life but about other movies.

Lawrence [has] rarely been more appealing. That's partly because this latest incarnation of his usual persona is more vulnerable and likeable, but mostly it's a relief not to see him strain so hard to Bogart all the jokes.

If the idea of watching Martin Lawrence getting used and abused appeals to you, then Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins is the movie for you.

A frenzied comedy promoting the family values of loud, obnoxious and mean.

Truth be told, everyone and everything about Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins is pretty unlikable.

Actors such as Michael Clarke Duncan, Mo'Nique, Mike Epps and Cedric the Entertainer have been persuaded by writer-director Malcolm D. Lee to do crass routines that should have gone out with minstrel shows.

Writer-director Malcolm D. Lee sets out to prove that you can go home again, but the lesson apparently is that it's going to be painful for everyone involved (audiences included).