Mo' Money
1992
Cast: Damon Wayans, Marlon Wayans, Stacey Dash, Joe Santos, John Diehl
Genre: Romantic Comedy Crime-Drama
Worldwide Box Office Gross: over $40 million
Plot: A con artist manages to find a job at a credit card company & falls in love with one of his employees. However, he finds himself drawn into a world of crime
'Scattered, confusing, tonally all over the place'
A petty crook & street hustler has grown sick of his risking his life for the sake of a $50 con job and enticed by a fellow female coworker, he finds himself a job in the mailroom and is later embroiled in a credit card scam involving the head of security at Johnny's firm.
Mo' Money is marred by a confusing tone, a conflicting plot and the script is certainly debatable. When the film shifts gears in the last third and turns dark & it turns into a good guy versus bad guys action flick, for the most part, it was relatively okay. It had some moments (the action climax was by far the highlight), but it lacked a focus and due to the tonal and genre shifts, the story wasn't consistent, & as fully engaging and good as it should have been.
If this was solely a rom-com, Mo'Money would have worked, if this was an action flick, I could see it working as well; if this had been a pure comedy, it needed better jokes and humour, which this offering was in short supply of. They just needed to choose one of these genres that best suited the story. Mo' Money got through by word-of-mouth due to the success of the song, 'The Best Things In Life Are Free' by Luther Vandross and Janet Jackson. Mo-Money was also Damon Wayans' first major feature movie outing, after being cast opposite Bruce Willis in Tony Scott's The Last Boy Scout, one year before. It appeared that with Mo Money, the film tried to mode and market Wayans as an Eddie Murphy-type.
The mish-mashed genres and tonal shifts worked better in the similarly-ish Grosse Pointe Blank of 1997. Additionally, as a product of its time, Mo' Money was released months after the far superior, Boomerang with Eddie Murphy and Halle Berry, which whilst plot-wise is slightly different to Mo'Money, was a tad more classy, and all-round was more-if not so much as refined as a Black-based romantic comedy. Whereas Mo' Money seems a bit of a bungling affair, and Wayans and MacDonald wanted to aim for more, but it turns out they did a bit too much; I couldn't take the main villain seriously, and he just wasn't threatening enough, the love story with Stacey Dash is throwaway, the complicated story and tonal shifts, which never made a lot of sense, didn't hold my attention for long periods and it is just, so incredibly scattered there is no joining up of the dots when it comes to ideas in relation to the story. Though performance-wise, Marlon Wayans (who came in as a replacement for A Different World's Kadeem Hardison) did well in a supporting role to his elder brother, Damon.
Final Verdict:
Peter MacDonald doesn't have a particularly notable track record as a director (Rambo 3, Neverending Story 3, Legionnaire with Jean-Claude Van Damme and Super Dave), whilst producer-wise, I enjoyed 1989's Tango and Cash. And yet in Mo' Money, it shows his dearths behind the camera, whereas Damon Wayans's script needed a lot more work, as well as tinkering.
In contrast to 1992's other offering, Boomerang, it appears as such that Mo' Money acted as the hipper, more street-cred cousin for Black rom-coms; yet unluckily, film-wise, it is so far wide off-the-mark.
Overall:
1992
Cast: Damon Wayans, Marlon Wayans, Stacey Dash, Joe Santos, John Diehl
Genre: Romantic Comedy Crime-Drama
Worldwide Box Office Gross: over $40 million
Plot: A con artist manages to find a job at a credit card company & falls in love with one of his employees. However, he finds himself drawn into a world of crime
'Scattered, confusing, tonally all over the place'
A petty crook & street hustler has grown sick of his risking his life for the sake of a $50 con job and enticed by a fellow female coworker, he finds himself a job in the mailroom and is later embroiled in a credit card scam involving the head of security at Johnny's firm.
Mo' Money is marred by a confusing tone, a conflicting plot and the script is certainly debatable. When the film shifts gears in the last third and turns dark & it turns into a good guy versus bad guys action flick, for the most part, it was relatively okay. It had some moments (the action climax was by far the highlight), but it lacked a focus and due to the tonal and genre shifts, the story wasn't consistent, & as fully engaging and good as it should have been.
If this was solely a rom-com, Mo'Money would have worked, if this was an action flick, I could see it working as well; if this had been a pure comedy, it needed better jokes and humour, which this offering was in short supply of. They just needed to choose one of these genres that best suited the story. Mo' Money got through by word-of-mouth due to the success of the song, 'The Best Things In Life Are Free' by Luther Vandross and Janet Jackson. Mo-Money was also Damon Wayans' first major feature movie outing, after being cast opposite Bruce Willis in Tony Scott's The Last Boy Scout, one year before. It appeared that with Mo Money, the film tried to mode and market Wayans as an Eddie Murphy-type.
The mish-mashed genres and tonal shifts worked better in the similarly-ish Grosse Pointe Blank of 1997. Additionally, as a product of its time, Mo' Money was released months after the far superior, Boomerang with Eddie Murphy and Halle Berry, which whilst plot-wise is slightly different to Mo'Money, was a tad more classy, and all-round was more-if not so much as refined as a Black-based romantic comedy. Whereas Mo' Money seems a bit of a bungling affair, and Wayans and MacDonald wanted to aim for more, but it turns out they did a bit too much; I couldn't take the main villain seriously, and he just wasn't threatening enough, the love story with Stacey Dash is throwaway, the complicated story and tonal shifts, which never made a lot of sense, didn't hold my attention for long periods and it is just, so incredibly scattered there is no joining up of the dots when it comes to ideas in relation to the story. Though performance-wise, Marlon Wayans (who came in as a replacement for A Different World's Kadeem Hardison) did well in a supporting role to his elder brother, Damon.
Final Verdict:
Peter MacDonald doesn't have a particularly notable track record as a director (Rambo 3, Neverending Story 3, Legionnaire with Jean-Claude Van Damme and Super Dave), whilst producer-wise, I enjoyed 1989's Tango and Cash. And yet in Mo' Money, it shows his dearths behind the camera, whereas Damon Wayans's script needed a lot more work, as well as tinkering.
In contrast to 1992's other offering, Boomerang, it appears as such that Mo' Money acted as the hipper, more street-cred cousin for Black rom-coms; yet unluckily, film-wise, it is so far wide off-the-mark.
Overall:
No comments:
Post a Comment