I watched You People so you don't have to

Sometimes it's so unwise to go into something with high expectations, I realized that again last night. Because Jonah Hill, who has written a film and also plays the lead role. It can't miss, right? And when you also see that Eddie Murphy, David Duchovny, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus complete the cast, you think you're all set. I thought so. You People has all the ingredients to be a great movie, but completely misses the mark.

You People is about the Jewish Ezra, who meets the black Muslim Amira in a meet-cute way — he thinks she is his Uber driver. They make some jokes back and forth, there's a spark, and the film jumps ahead a bit in time: Ezra and Amira are a happy couple and he even wants to propose to her. Here I immediately encountered the first problem: Ezra and Amira are both nice people, but they are portrayed so two-dimensionally that as a viewer you feel little empathy for them, and you also don't feel any chemistry, desire, or love between them. Nowhere do we see or feel that this is the love of Ezra's life, the woman he absolutely wants to marry.

But well, he does want to. And he approaches it the old-fashioned way: asking her parents for her hand. The only problem is that he hasn't met Amira's parents yet, so he plans (behind her back) a lunch to get acquainted. You guessed it: this lunch goes dramatically. Jonah Hill plays his well-known character throughout the film, talking himself into uncomfortable situations in a passive way and seems unable to get out of them. That works great as a sidekick like in The Wolf Of Wallstreet, but much less so when he plays the lead role. You get tired of it very quickly.

Amira's parents, and especially her father Akbar (Eddie Murphy), is for some inexplicable reason really a huge jerk. And that's mainly what this film is full of: unkind, simple, tone-deaf characters. Akbar does the most unkind things to his new son-in-law, but we get zero explanation as to why he does that. Ezra's parents, and especially his mother, manage to get into awkward and silly situations, which she ends up in due to her ignorance about black and Islamic culture.

The film is full of clichés with this kind of ignorance. On one hand, it seems Jonah Hill wants to highlight a social issue with You People, on the other hand, it seems to lean more towards the romcom side. Result: a film full of clichés, predictabilities, and two main characters you don't get to know, surrounded only by unkind side characters. Final verdict: 4/10.