MOVIE REVIEWS: THE BEST MAN HOLIDAY

Most of the reviews for The Best Man Holiday would fall under the “so-so” category. Few critics hate it, but even fewer critics love it. The stars of the movie, who include Taye Diggs, Terrence Howard and Morris Chestnut, are given credit for making lemonade out of a lemon. As Michael Phillips notes in the Chicago Tribune, “Ensemble pictures live or die on the same simple question: Do we enjoy hanging out with these people for a couple of hours? The hangout factor remains gratifyingly high in The Best Man Holiday.” Elizabeth Weitzman in the New York Daily News remarks that “it’s a pleasure to see each of the actors enthusiastically returning to the roles that helped kickstart their careers.” And Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post applauds “the actors who bring warmth, humanity and compulsive watchability to every moment of The Best Man Holiday, no matter how ersatz, overprocessed or manipulative.” Indeed, it’s the plot of the movie that gets the back of the hand from most critics. Claudia Puig in USA Today concludes that “sentimental schmaltz competes with slapstick silliness for an uneven result.” And Linda Barnard in the Toronto Star comments, “The Best Man Holiday is akin to getting a massive, gorgeously wrapped Christmas present and opening it to find a pair of socks.” She’s referring to the let-down she experienced after the first hour of the movie, when, she says, it “collapses under the weight of a two-hour overdramatic slog.” But Kyle Smith in the New York Post finds the literal wrappings of the movie much to his liking. “For all of its appealing actors, the film’s true stars are those gorgeous sets — lush, immaculate, sparkling and vast,” he writes. “Seeing this movie is like moving into Williams-Sonoma for two hours.”