"Finally, and Yes and No: The Best Man Holiday—Reviewed by Stephane Dunn

"Okay, so there’s a really good reason why this review of TheBest Man Holiday [written and directed by Malcolm Lee] is way later than I’d normally offer, especially since I had the good fortune to view it a few days before it’s nationwide opening. You guess wrong if you think I feared that legions of Morris Chestnut’s would-be wives or lovers might literally hunt me down or that The Best Man fans would slay me – figuratively and digitally speaking of course. No, I actually had a rare lack of motivation to review it period except in my own head. My Best Man nostalgia was all up in the way, ditto that any chance I get to peep Morris Chestnut (Lance) on the big screen is always cool, and hanging out with my on-screen sistas – that’s icing. Nia Long (Jordan) and I go back to soap opera watching teen years all the way through Fresh Prince, Love Jones and The Best Man (1999). Sanaa Lathan (Robyn) sealed her place in the sacred circle with Love and Basketball, and Monica Calhoun (Mia) is a sista actress who’s been underrepresented even in popular African American motion pictures.
The rest of the cast, including Terrence Howard’s bad boy, loyal friend Quentin, Harold Perrineau (Julian), and the always eye pleasing Taye Diggs (Harper), make up such an appealing crew that it renders Hollywood’s ‘surprise’ over it’s box office success that much more absurd. I had a little pent up hype built over so many years [fifteen] between the first film and the sequel, and I was bothered that after it was over, I thought too long and that was cool. No exclamation point that was cool just that was cool. What to do with that? Luckily, I have a cadre of real life sista’ colleague-pals and one rare holiday hour lunch talking everything, including Best Man Holiday, shook me from vacillating between to review or not. As it turns out, I’m not the only Best Man fan with a mixed review of The Best Man Holiday.
The great news is that I probably won’t be doing too much spoiling ‘cause fans have been going to see it. The Best Man Holidayis an undeniable success and for the zillionth time Hollywood is being reminded that there is and has long been a massive African-American movie-going audience, which will actually support African-American centered films. Best Manfans have gotten that sequel and gotten to see something we normally don’t get when it comes to black centered popular classics – a view of familiar characters further into adulthood – full-grown and living some complicated realities. The film starts promisingly enough with glimpses of the current individual lives of the crew and an invitation to a holiday gathering at the dream couple Lance and Mia's house.
After the crew assembles, Lee gets overly busy throwing in a whole lot at a jarringly accelerated speed; intriguing melodrama then veers alarmingly towards mere mushy sentimentality. Yes, movies, and this one is no different, are fiction and fantasy but we watch for it to be real - at least for two hours. Beloved central character, Mia's cancer is huge but the least amount of actual screen time is given over to the ramifications of that; there are too few scenes that linger over Mia’s  and her husband and friends’ grappling with her illness and the impending finality of it. The cancer reveal, Mia’s dying and death, all must be taken care of by Christmas Day, the prelude to which is the really big question: Should Lance play in the big annual Christmas Day football game or stay with his dying wife? Of course he must play. His noble dying wife encourages her husband to go and reminds him that he must play for a bigger reason than them both, God.
So there it is, problem number two. Now that Tyler Perry [with T. D. Jakes hot on his heels] has shouted out the profit potential in speaking to the Biblical, church-going-praying roots of black folk, the exhibition of Christian authenticity is becoming a annoyingly clichéd cue in films. In The Best Man, the religious fervor is taken seriously as we see young football star Lance starting his real grown up adult life by reforming from his college playboy days and relying on his spiritual roots to make the transformation, which the wedding to his college sweetheart Mia signifies.
An iconic moment in that first film features Lance on his knees praying after finding out his best friend Harper slept with his soon-to-be-bride; he struggles to contain his anger and hurt and go through with the wedding. But in Best Man Holiday, Lee allows it to be a too obvious cue, trying to make it play virtually the same as it does in the first movie. It doesn’t work. The older, successful, confident Lance is no longer the naïve, hurt, flawed young man trying earnestly to do right and find the courage and strength to love and forgive through his faith and prayer. He’s older and settled into an openly bitter anger and pessimism towards his estranged friend. His religious fervor isn’t endearing but heavy-handed, even self-blinding.  
Still, of course I was fumbling for a forgotten Kleenex in my purse by the time he races home from the victory field with his boys to his wife’s bedside, hoping he isn’t too late and in-between Nia Long sits silent, alone, tears rolling down her face when her nice girl nemesis hands her a Kleenex [after all, it dawns on me that Lee is actually going to go through with this killing of one of the central characters in my Best Man crew and like now, on the same Christmas Day now].
In the midst of all this serious business, major problem number three is really perhaps the worst. In the period between the first film and Best Man Holiday, reality shows featuring the ‘wives’ of everything with black women snipping, cat-fighting, and bitching their way to fame and some fortune have become a staple of contemporary popular culture. The fact that Lee perhaps tries to up the contemporary familiarity of his sequel by giving a totally unnecessary, rather consciously intended or not, nod to this staple actually drove a good sister-friend-Best Man lover fumbling for her Kleenex before the film got to the dying part.
I raged and fumed. So black women get authenticated once again through friction and conflict that must inevitably erupt into reaching for the weave, screaming expletives, and rolling around on the nearest flat surface be it a talk show, a restaurant, or the foyer of a gorgeous house in front of children? The treatment of Candace (Regina Hall) and Shelby (Melissa De Sousa) before and after the fight scene doesn’t mean nearly as much since the catfight is beneath who these characters are at present and the original film.
Problem number four has nothing to do with The Best Man Holiday or it’s director. It belongs to me and other fans and that’s the heavy burden of expectation that comes with sequels to films that manage to make us like them so much the first time around that we long for more but then fear that more won’t be as satisfying as the first round and then have to deal with it when the sequel doesn’t bring the same or fantastically better experience though it’s not that it was bad. At last, here is the short crux of a too long review, The Best Man Holiday satisfies and it doesn’t. Before you angry comment me, that doesn’t mean I’m still not glad I got to chill with my Best Man crew one more time. I’m even more glad it’s crushing at the box office.    
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Stephane Dunn, PhD, is a writer who directs the Cinema, Television, & Emerging Media Studies program at Morehouse College. She teaches film, creative writing, and literature. She is the author of the 2008 book, Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas : Black Power Action Films (U of Illinois Press). Her writings have appeared in Ms., The Chronicle of Higher Education, TheRoot.com, AJC,  CNN.com, and Best African American Essays, among others. Her recent work includes the Bronze Lens-Georgia Lottery Lights, Camera Georgia winning short film Fight for Hope and book chapters exploring representation in Tyler Perry's films.