LL Cool J knocks out Gabrielle Union in "Deliver Us From Eva."
(Focus Features)
|
|
A sort of hip-hop version of "The Taming of the Shrew," this is about the super-nasty Eva (Gabrielle Union), who is perfect to her three sisters (Essence Atkins, Robinne Lee and Meagan Good), but a haughty, sarcastic and meddlesome pain to just about everyone else. We're talking restaurateurs (she's an over-eager health inspector) and, most particularly, the three sisters' men (Mel Jackson, Dartanyan Edmonds and Duane Martin). Their plan: pay their super-player friend Ray (LL Cool J) to seduce this horse-riding, choir-singing, man-killing perfectionist, and then dump her. Supposedly, this will keep her too busy to get into other people's lives. Predictably, Ray and Eva fall for each other a little too hard. And their perfect love comes back to haunt the men, whose wives think everyone should follow the same model. Writer-director Gary ("The Brothers") Hardwick clearly wants to make this more than another hip-hop comedy, but that desire evaporates in the face of loopy storytelling (including a nutty kidnapping plot), one-dimensional archetypes, too much predictability and not enough comedy. Contains obscene language and sexual situations.
