The premise of 1967’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is retooled for millennials in this sporadically funny but overstretched culture-clash comedy. Ezra (Jonah Hill, who co-wrote the film with director Kenya Barris), a Jewish investment banker, meets Black costume designer Amira (Lauren London) by chance – he mistakes her for his Uber driver. But from this inauspicious encounter, romance blossoms. Soon enough, they meet each other’s parents. Ezra’s mother and father (Julia Louis-Dreyfus and David Duchovny) tie themselves in mortifying knots to prove their liberal credentials. When Arnold (Duchovny) drops the name of rapper Xzibit into the conversation, it sounds suspiciously as though this is the only Black person he can think of. Meanwhile, Amira’s parents, particularly her father, Akbar (Eddie Murphy), are openly hostile to their daughter’s fiance. The first third of the picture is promising, if frequently excruciating. But the points are painfully laboured and the jokes run out of steam.
