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Guess who's guaranteed a major disappointment?

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The woeful "Guess Who" is not a remake of Stanley Kramer's "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," which starred Sidney Poitier as the man engaged to Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy's daughter. Nor is it a "re-imagining."

Nope. According to producer-star Ashton Kutcher, "Guess Who" is an "annotation" of the 1967 film.

Columbia Pictures

'Guess Who'

The verdict: This lame Ashton Kutcher-Bernie Mac movie leaves you feeling Punk'd.

Director: Kevin Rodney Sullivan
Starring: Bernie Mac, Ashton Kutcher, Zoe Saldana
Run time: 97 minutes
Release date: March 25, 2005
Rating: PG for sex-related humor
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On the web
Official movie site
View the trailer
-- Trailers require Quicktime

A spit-take is more like it.

Inverting the racial politics of the earlier picture, this version casts Bernie Mac as the well-to-do patriarch who is surprised — make that, appalled — when his smart, beautiful daughter (Zoe Saldana) brings home her boyfriend (Kutcher). What Mac had in mind was someone named, oh, Jamal, not some white boy.

Merriment ensues. Well, merriment if you thought the dumb gags framing the religious/ethnic tensions in "Meet the Parents/Fockers" were funny.

Kutcher wants to know why Saldana neglected to tell her family he was "pigment challenged" before bringing him home for their 25th-anniversary party. Kutcher and Mac work out their mutual antagonism in a go-cart challenge. And then there's the gut-busting dinner scene in which Kutcher is encouraged by Mac to tell every racial joke he knows. And he goes one joke too far!

Are we laughing yet?

One interesting thing: The name stars, Kutcher and Mac, are the least effective actors in the cast. One looks slightly abashed for the entire movie, and the other repeats his well-known bug-eyed slow-burn.

However, Saldana is lithe, lovely and savvy. In one of the movie's few serious scenes, she talks with her father about her awareness of the problems facing interracial couples. It's one of the few bright moments in the movie. Judith Scott is attractive and entirely credible as Saldana's mom. And Kellee Stewart, stuck in the cliched role of the sister/sistah, nonetheless gets a lot of mileage out of her limited character. She's the only one happy to see pigment-challenged Kutcher because, "If I crash the car, if I burn this house down, I won't be the one who brought home a white guy."

You'd expect something better from Kevin Rodney Sullivan, who directed the amiable and entertaining "Barbershop 2: Back in Business." But "Guess Who" isn't very smart and it isn't very funny. In fact, it isn't much of anything.