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In this demented mash-up of “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” “Kramer Vs. Kramer” and a year’s worth of “Good Times” reruns, poor-but-humble mechanic Monty (Idris Elba) is in the midst of a court battle for custody of his three adorable daughters (Sierra, Lauren and China McClain) from his monstrous ex-wife (Tasha Smith), a crack whore who has become the girlfriend of the local drug kingpin. Luckily for him, Julia (Gabrielle Union), the woman that he winds up chauffeuring around as a second job, turns out to be a high-priced lawyer who agrees to take care of his case. Even better, she is unable to find a man of her own (a common problem for women who make six figures and look like Gabrielle Union) and so Monty is able to reciprocate by taking care of hers.

Like Perry’s other films, “Daddy’s Little Girls” is a virtually unwatchable stew of sadism and sentiment marked by technical sloppiness and narrative incoherence. I’m not even talking about the ridiculous court case where the courts seem positively giddy at the prospect of taking three young children away from their hard-working father to give them to a known drug dealer and his crack-whore moll, a woman so hideous that her own mother sided with her former son-in-law before being claimed by a convenient case of lung cancer. Then there is the case of Julia’s two buppie pals who are horrified at the notion of her dating someone below her social status–this comes after they have knowingly set her up with a broke, unemployed and uncouth 40-year-old wanna-be rapper and then criticized her for not relaxing her standards. Then there is Perry’s tin ear for dialogue–either everyone speaks in sentences choked with exposition (“I have lung cancer. I am dying!”) or are forced to deliver lines so creaky that you thought they had been banned years ago. (When was the last time you can recall hearing people in a film seriously uttering such lines as “We come from two different worlds” or “God, you’re a filthy liar”?) And like his earlier films, it ends with our hero exploding into violence (by ramming into his ex’s car at top speed and beating the crap out of the drug dealer, all to the tune of “A Change Is Gonna Come”) and getting away with it scot-free while everyone cheers and applauds in a sequence that seems wildly at odds with the religious elements shamelessly shoehorned in elsewhere.

While I didn’t exactly walk into “Daddy’s Little Girls” with the highest of expectations, I did hope that the shedding of the amazingly abrasive Madea character might have helped focus Perry enough so that he could tell a story that didn’t rely on the kind of ham-fisted melodrama that even Oscar Michaux might have found excessive. Alas, this is not the case here–without that character to fall back on, he seems even more lost at sea than before. Even when he comes up with something that almost works–a dramatic moment here or a joke there, he kills the moment with the kind of staging rarely seen outside of videos of high-school theatrical productions.

Frankly, the most entertaining moment in the film is an inadvertent one–Louis Gossett Jr., who plays a noble mechanic, announces that he is leaving town and the film cuts from a shot of him to a scene at an aquarium that feels like Perry’s homage to Gossett’s work in the immortal “Jaws 3-D,” one of the many movies that you will see in your lifetime that have been put together with more care than this one. Other than that, “Daddy’s Little Girls” is a sorry excuse for filmmaking whose sole redeeming virtue is the fact that it is slightly better than “Norbit.”

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originally posted: 02/15/07 15:38:35
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