The Best Man Holiday

Fourteen years after the original, writer-director Malcolm D. Lee and friends finally get around to making a sequel to the highly successful 1999 film The Best Man. The results are mixed, with a likeable cast straining to keep Lee's script vibrant until the all too silly end. Harper (Taye Diggs) is experiencing a lull in his writing career, and looks to get former friend, NFL star Lance (Morris Chestnut) to OK him as the writer of his biography. (It's actually cool to see Chestnut playing a football star; it's as if his aspiring athlete in Boyz n the Hood never got shot). So Harper, and much of the cast of the original (including Monica Calhoun, Regina Hall, Harold Perrineau and a very funny Terrence Howard) reunite at Lance's house where decent comedy and terrible melodrama commences. As a laugher, the film gets some good ones, especially when Howard is on the screen. As a drama, it has a mawkish, Hallmark movie channel feel that derails it. It's too bad, because some of the players make this one worth watching at times.