+ 2nd Worst Movie of the Year
+ Most Deserved Flop of the Year
 |
| The blissful stars shine under an angelic Mary J. Blige on this poster for Kasi Lemmons' Black Nativity |
A young man from Baltimore gets sent by his mother to his alienated grandparents in New York, when the two face eviction just before Christmas.
Black Nativity is the 4th feature from Missourian writer-director Kasi Lemmons (The Caveman's Valentine (2001)), based on the same-titled 1961 play by Langston Hughes (The Negro Mother and Other Dramatic Recitations (1931)).
The casting of the young R&B artist Jacob Latimore (The Maze Runner (2014)) as the protagonist is fatal for the generally spectacularly awful Black Nativity. Latimore, although sexy, cannot act, or at least doesn't betray any gifts in the discipline here. If you disregard the periods where he inexplicably breaks out in song, Latimore interchanges between two looks here, which he sport throughout the film: Either the 'innocent-lion-cub' expression, (which is strained greatly by his being a 16 or 17 year-old boy), or the apathetically tired/nearly zombielike, sedated look. No great musical (or acting) star is born here, I regretfully predict.
Black Nativity is an embarrassing and involuntarily funny musical drama. The cringe-worthy scenes sting more when showbiz veterans like Nas (John Q (2002)), Angela Bassett (Notorious (2009)), Mary J. Blige (Rock of Ages (2012)) and Forest Whitaker (American Gun (2005)) appear in them, and Whitaker, who is the most acclaimed actor in the bunch, is particularly awful as the boy's seriously presented but strikingly phony reverend grandfather.
The film's terribleness doesn't end with its lousy performances; often it is also incomprehensible, as when characters sing of things we have not been introduced to and won't be. - Or when Latimore, (also symptomatically for Black Nativity, I might add), falls asleep in church and wakes up with Jesus in Times Square.
Not one second comes out right or naturally in this film; from the overly smiley, clean and healthy-looking homeless lovebirds, who also dance and sing, SPOILER to the grotesquely hammy, ham-fisted ending, which plays out the Nativity scene as a sort of Jerry Springer show (without the violence) in front of puzzled churchgoers. Black Nativity surely didn't aim for it, but it takes bad taste to new heights.
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Cost: 17.5 mil. $
Box office: 7.4 mil. $
= Mega-flop
[Black Nativity premiered November 27 (North America) and runs 93 minutes. Shooting took place in New York around January 2013. The film opened #9 with 3.6 mil. $ in North America and only went plummeting down from there, grossing 7 mil. $ (94.6 % of the total gross.) It had a release in Germany and France in the summer of 2014 with undisclosed, definitely low results. Its biggest foreign market was the UK with 245k $ (3.3 %). Lemmons has directed an episode of Shots Fired (2017, TV-series) since the film but has otherwise left filmmaking and acting alone. Black Nativity is rotten at 51 % with a 5.6/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of Black Nativity?
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