You People (2023)

Comedy
Rated 15
Netflix
Not Spoiler Free, but come on...

Boasting a sub-par IMDb rating (although my opinion on how little those mean to me I’ve made clear before) and some bad reviews, which again in previous parenthesis, I put You People on regardless. It’s free, innit, once you forget you pay for it anyway like FightZone which has cost me £2 a month since I got it to watch a mate’s fight a year ago and they’ve had fuck all else on. Anyway, I wasn’t expecting much from this update of 1967's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, save I quite like Jonah Hill.

To my delight, You People is very, very funny when Jonah Hill is riffing and I was really enjoying it, for a short while. The cringe begins when they’re going through the race motions, establishing that everyone is either massively uncool about people of different colour to them, or an outright dick about everyone like Eddie Murphy’s character. He’s an insufferable hypocrite, dropping “nigger” every other word as if he’s auditioning for Boyz n the Hood and because it is supposed to make you feel uncomfortable. It just feels like they had no other way of drilling into you early he’s a racist prick.

Fortunately, in one of the film’s only saving graces, Jonah Hill’s character does eventually realise and point out to him that he's a bellend.

Even if a performance in a film with this subject matter isn’t funny, which Murphy’s isn’t, it does at least need to be recognisable as something with greater depth. They try and add that later, but really it's just excuses. He plays it wrong in my opinion, but it’s a difficult subject to get right. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is outdated and refreshers such as You People aren't needed- who of the original’s fans (left alive) were clamouring to see 2023’s take on idiocy with added stupid outfits?

Why, why, in these films do the characters always seem to have money? It is aspirational codswallop. Why is that? To get you to buy trainers, or to want more, or because you don’t believe poorer people in love is as funny? Jonah Hill and Lauren London (great name) are loaded and gaudy and I hate them not for the colour of their skin, or their religion (Nike), but for just embodying why these films miss the mark; superficiality.

They’re amusing, but my 96 year old uncle can crack jokes and even he’s not as racist as Eddie Murphy’s character. Unlike my uncle I can’t love these people despite their faults.

A funny start dried up faster than the inevitable marriage of Hill and London('s characters), who will realise that clothes and hating their parents aren’t a reason to spunk thousands on a wedding with flower trainers like an East End funeral. Spoiler alert, just like Pearly Queens, their style and love is doomed. THERE WILL BE NO SEQUEL*.

Bedsit it?

Jonah Hill is hilarious, able to make me laugh with facial ticks, but his character is a bit of a bellend. You People ends up being less than good, populated with forgettable characters and the only memorable ones are twats of one sort or the other, plus it perpetuates a gaudy kind of love. Yuck. 3/10
*Please God.

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