Kingdom Come

Doug McHenry's screen adaptation of David Bottrell's play Dearly Departed is full of sentiment and heartstring tugging, but it's also mired in a single gear, and the forays into humor are ill-timed and sophomoric. After "Bud" Slocumb keels over, the "very extended" Slocumb clan rallies around his not-so-grieving widow (Whoopi Goldberg) and the parade of broken souls lumbers in. One son's a brooding mechanic with a curbed hankering for drink (LL Cool J), the other's an impoverished adulterer (Anthony Anderson), and their cousin is a skirt-chasing bum (Darius McCrary). The women in their lives are all hysterical nut jobs (Jada Pinkett Smith and Loretta Devine) or calm nurturing figures (Vivica A. Fox) far too cognizant to be caught up in this dysfunctional mayhem. Whoopi spends the entirety of the film nodding and rolling her eyes. Cool J provides the one heartfelt nugget as he delivers the eulogy for a "hard man," but that's only after the minister hastily abandons the pulpit because his Mexican meal has cast him into gastro-intestinal hell. At the Showcase (Seekonk 1-10) and Tri-Boro cinemas.
-- Tom Meek