When you see a movie featuring the majority of Black characters as drug dealers, hookers, pimps or junkies, you can usually lay odds that it isn't a film done by a Black director(although this does happen). After all these decades, main-stream Hollywood still doesn't fully understand that just like Caucasians, Blacks come in multi-dimensional layers as human beings, and that we essentially hold the same aspira-tions and dreams in our hearts. Thus the aforementioned images are what the public more commonly sees and becomes accustomed to thinking of our race as in their minds. Spike Lee and a host of other Black filmmakers stepped into the spotlight because they were tired of seeing such lame interpretations of us on the silver screen, and decided it was time to change the perception...flip the script, if you will.

     The problem with such(necessary) revisionism is that in the rush to exonerate our people, many Black directors have gone to the extreme to show how normal the majority of our lives are, and that we can hold down steady, well-paying jobs. This extreme tends to populate a lot of well-intentioned films with stock characters and bland storylines, leading to failure at the box office for these movies, when many of them certain-ly don't deserve such a fate(see 1997's Love Jones).

 
     Which brings us to This Christmas.

     The movie focuses on the Whitfield family, an everyday African-American clan with standard lives and normal jobs, who are a very tight-knit family. Their matriarch Ma'Dere(Loretta Devine) and her boyfriend Joseph(Delroy Lindo) live together in her large house in a California suburb, where they have a Hispanic maid(see, white people? We're not that different!) and are eagerly awaiting the return of the grown kids at Christmastime. Oldest son Quentin(the always reliable Idris Elba) decides to come home at the last minute because he's running from some thugs to whom he owes a debt. Ma'Dere and Joseph however, haven't yet told Quentin they're living together in the house, because Quentin still misses his real father who abandoned the family years ago. So Ma'Dere and Joseph decide to keep their arrangement a secret. Youngest son Michael "Baby" Whitfield(singer Chris Brown) has a desire to be...surprise!...a singer, but knows that since deserter dad left to chase his musical dreams, his own might break Ma'Dere's heart, so he chooses to keep it a secret.

     Middle son Claude has married a beautiful young white woman(told you we'd steal them all!) named Sandi(Jessica Stroup), and has gone A.W.O.L. from his military base to see her and visit the family, but has chosen to keep his mischief secret. Oldest sister Lisa(Regina King) is becoming disen-chanted with her marriage to her cheating husband Malcolm(Laz Alonso), but has decided to keep it...a secret. Youngest sisters Kelli(Sharon Leal) and Melanie(Lauren London) have just met men with whom they share incredible chemistry, but decide to keep their sexual shenanigans...yep, you guessed it...a secret.

     A couple of major failings of director Preston A. Whitmore II's(Crossover, Doing Hard Time) film is not that there are so many secrets to cover...the film does so deftly, and Whit-more's direction is relaxed and certain...but A)it misses the opportunity to explore the possibility that because there are so many secrets, is there actually any truth to be found in the relationships, and B)the secrets on display are so bland and ordinary. While I'm not advocating that Whitmore had done a guns-'n'-gangstas film, he could have found some type of moderate balance between the two. There are various types of addictions besides drugs: gambling, alcoholic, sexual, just to name a few of the myriad vices to be found within the human condition. Why couldn't "Baby" have fallen victim to one of these vices and his family have to intervene to save him? The issue of homosexuality is also a taboo subject within the African-American community. Having a military son like Claude be A.W.O.L. because he wants to see the man he's secretly married to would have been a prime opportunity to inspire much-needed dialogue. Having him not only married to Sandi but have her parents dislike him because he's Black falls back on one of the laziest of all relationship issues, which truly isn't as much of one as it used to be.

     Oddly, Whitmore gives Lisa and her cheating husband two kids. The reasons why these kids are in the movie--aside from obviously displaying what's at stake should the couple separ-ate--are never clear. The children are almost completely underutilized, and to my recollection, only one of them has a single line of dialogue, wherein they only say their name to Kelli's boyfriend(Mekhi Phifer), who dresses up as Santa Claus. The kids could have been written out, and their absence would have had absolutely zero effect on the story-line.

     The most interesting(and relatively original) problem to be solved is that of elder son Quentin, who faces serious bodily injury from the two thugs that have made the trek to California to collect on the money he owes to their boss. Luckily, Whit-more had the good sense to cast the undervalued yet ever-skilled Idris Elba(28 Weeks Later, the British tv series Ultra-violet), who carries his portion of the film dependably upon his shoulders. Not to say the rest of the cast is anything but superb; they are, each one holding their own on screen. There's certainly not one loser in the bunch. But much like 1997's Soul Food, which had the unlikely genetic match of Vanessa Williams, Vivica A. Fox and Nia Long as sisters, so also does This Christmas bring us a holy trinity of actresses so impossibly beautiful(Regina King, Sharon Leal and Lauren London), it's almost beyond comprehension that a single family tree could produce them all. It's a gorgeous distraction

...but a distraction from the story, nonetheless(In contrast though, at least none of them are Idina Menzel).

     In the end though, and in spite of its flaws, I can't say that This Christmas isn't entertaining. It certainly is. It fulfills the promise of a light family film which it's(relatively) safe to take the kids to, in spite of some mild violence and light language. The cast gives their all, doing the most they can to sell their characters. If only the story and its themes had been a little tighter, This Christmas could have been truly great. But I guess we have to settle for the knowledge that in between the moments of family bonding, we get to find out that Bill O'Reilly might have actually been right: Blacks just aren't really that different from white people.