'Honeymooners' remake isn't a great one, but has its moments

Friday, June 10, 2005

By WILLIAM ARNOLD
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER MOVIE CRITIC

In the context of the sad history of bringing classic TV to the big screen, "The Honeymooners" is not half bad. Unlike, say, the "Beverly Hillbillies" or "Car 54, Where Are You?" movies, it's not a complete travesty. At the same time, it's nothing at all special.

MOVIE REVIEW

THE HONEYMOONERS

DIRECTOR: John Schultz
CAST: Cedric the Entertainer, Mike Epps, Gabrielle Union, Regina Hall
RUNNING TIME: 89 minutes
RATING: PG-13 for some innuendo and rude humor
GRADE: C

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Its cheeky central idea of recasting the four principal characters -- who live, you may recall, in the lower-middle class disharmony of a rundown Brooklyn apartment building -- with black actors, somehow (and I'm not completely sure why) works.

As Ralph Kramden, Cedric the Entertainer does not try to "do" Jackie Gleason (if anything, he's doing Martin Lawrence) and the script omits the character's wife-beating fantasies -- no "To the Moon, Alice" or "One of these days, Alice ... Pow! Right in the kisser!"

Yet the script otherwise stays close to the traditions of the old sitcom, and resists the temptation to junk it up with a lot of new millennium toilet humor -- which must have been tough, given the fact that one of the principals is a sewer worker.

Even the plot, which has the guys buying an old private railroad car in a scheme to make fast money, is a tribute of sorts, because Gleason, afraid of flying, was famous for being the last millionaire to travel around the country by that antique means.

On the other hand, there's nothing like the potent character chemistry and abrasive bite that has made the original series (best known for its 39-episode 1955 season) a rerun institution in our culture for the past half-century.

Sometimes this becomes painfully obvious, as when Mike Epps as Ed Norton tries to pull off one of Art Carney's signature routines -- taking an annoyingly long time to rake up and break the balls on the pool table -- and it just doesn't "play" at all.

Like all remakes of TV shows and movies that work off the personality of a unique star -- "I Love Lucy," say, or "Casablanca" -- this harmless but mediocre enterprise was doomed to failure from the start. Hollywood magic can do a lot, but it can't raise the dead.