Former Saturday Night Live castmates Eddie Murphy and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, two of the funniest people alive, are reunited and then immediately wasted in You People. A culture-clash romcom wholeheartedly convinced it’s a satire, it marks the feature directorial debut of Kenya Barris – creator of the sitcom Black-ish and its spin-offs, Grown-ish and Mixed-ish. Was this, at some point or another, the concept for a series, too? It certainly feels that way. You People carries the unresolved, disjointed tension of a sitcom that’s been stretched to the two-hour mark.
Louis-Dreyfus and Murphy play Shelley Cohen and Akbar Mohammed, respective parents to Ezra (Jonah Hill) and Amira (Lauren London), a couple whose first interaction involves a mistaken accusation of racial discrimination. The Cohens are liberal and Jewish, and Shelley swears she hated Gone with the Wind “before it was cool”. Akbar experienced a mid-life renewal of his Muslim faith and has a profound distrust of anyone outside of the religion. When Ezra and Amira announce their engagement, both families are plunged into a crisis entirely of their own making.
