“Malibu’s Most Wanted” is the third highest grossing movie in the land, behind the Adam Sandler flick “Anger Management” and children’s book-turned-movie, “Holes.”
How exactly this many people were fooled into spending their hard earned $7.50 on a movie running for a moronic 86 minutes is not hard to understand. Today’s doctored-up trailers, before-movie previews and Jamie Kennedy’s, “Malibu’s” star and co-writer, pre-established fan base ensured theater success. Kennedy’s TV series, “JKX: The Jamie Kennedy Experiment,” is in its second season on the WB.
The movie begins with main character “B-Rad’s” surreal tour around Malibu, in which he refers to his home as “Malibootay” and introduces us to his “Beach Boyzzz.” Merely watching a pampered white boy trying to talk like a gangsta is barely enough to keep one interested in the movie’s repetitive plot.
Kennedy’s character, Brad (B-Rad) Gluckman, is from a rich, Jewish Californian family. His dad, Bill Gluckman (Ryan O’Neil), is campaigning to be the next governor of California. Bill does not understand why his son acts like a rapper, runs with a crew that does not include any blacks, yet continues to pursue the gangster lifestyle in his “pimped out Escalade.”
Bill hires B-Rad to design signs and posters for his campaign. After B-Rad creates a sign for a women’s convention that reads “Bill Gluckman, down with the Bitches and Hoes,” Bill’s campaign managers become concerned with his plummeting voter popularity.
Gluckman’s campaign manager is convinced B-Rad will ruin any chance of election and sets up family therapy. Therapy does not work, so in desperation, two black actors are hired to “scare the black” out of him. Sean and PJ, (Taye Diggs and Anthony Anderson) are aspiring actors who set up a kidnapping to bring B-Rad into South Central Los Angeles. Shondra (Regina Hall) is paid to catch B-Rad’s eye and lure him into taking a ride to her “hizzouse” in Compton, where Sean and PJ carjack B-Rad and take him on a tour of the hood to make him reveal his “true” color.
B-Rad proves everyone shouldn’t “be hatin” through his tour of ghetto life. He gets caught up in an “8-Mile”- like rhyme battle, a gang shooting and is given a gun when “The Nines” induct him into the crew. All this action is overshadowed by the movie’s failing plot. B-Rad never progresses past his poseur attitude, which gets worse toward the end.
The movie is funny at times. Jamie Kennedy generally is regarded as a creative up-and-coming comic, but his self-described “wigga” antics only can be taken for so long until they become annoying.
“I may be white, but my rhymes is tight,” Kennedy rhymes with about as much flow as I do, but I know when to quit.
It is fun to laugh at Kennedy and his motley crew, but eventually that even gets repetitive. The one-joke movie concludes with purposely funny out-takes even worse than the actual movie.
The movie’s saving grace might be the appearance of Ronnie the Rizzat, a computer-animated mouse voiced by Snoop Dogg. Ronnie the Rizzat could have tutored Kennedy and helped him be “down” or maybe even slapped some sense into him.
Unfortunately, Ronnie the Rizzat was on screen for barely three minutes, a cameo that no doubt bought Snoop Dogg another drop-top Bentley, but all the money in the world could not buy this movie more than one star.