It’s heavily patriarchal, as the husband is the only one to see the danger and tries to “handle” the situation on his own. Things follow a generally predictable path from there, with the question “What sort of game are they/Is she running here?” hanging over it all. Mousy but lovely Anna va-va-vooms up with barely an effort. And sure enough, the boyfriend beats up poor Anna, they invite Anna to stay with them and Temptation is Right Under Their Roof. John keeps his misgivings to himself to please his desperate-for-a-baby wife. And chef Laura (Hall) just melts for her, heedless of the dangers in putting their last egg into somebody whose beau does too much speaking for her and seems too eager to pass himself off as her pimp in this arrangement. “I’ve never been able to give anybody anything!” she gushes. He’s a high-end corporate attorney who senses something predatory in the guy, and a little too goody-two-shoes about the young woman. Something about Anna (Sinclair) and her boyfriend (Theo Rossi) gives John Taylor (Chestnut) pause. It’s derivative and obvious, downright risible as it portrays Screen Gems’ go-to affluent hunk, Morris Chestnut, manfully resisting the frank sexual advances of the possibly dangerous and unstable surrogate (Jaz Sinclair) he and his wife (Regina Hall) have hired to carry their “last viable embryo” to term.īut from its New Orleans mansion and penthouse office suites, to its Mercedes and parties packed with haute couture glamour, it presents a vision of African American aspiration and achievement that Hollywood generally ignores. “When the Bough Breaks” does for surrogate mothers what “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle” did for nannies, and does for another character what “Fatal Attraction” did for bunnies.
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But they share a sheen, a polish and a beauty that puts Tyler Perry’s similar ambitions to shame. The films may not have African-American directors or screenwriters, and some suffer a tone-deafness because of that.
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The studio, which gets by on random horror hits and the occasional franchise (“Resident Evil”) has made glossy African American comedies (“This Christmas”, “The Wedding Ringer”), romances (“Not Easily Broken”) and thrillers (“Obsessed,””No Good Deed”) its low-risk/high-return bread and better. If college cinema professors aren’t teaching “The Screen Gems View of Urban Affluence and its Impact on African American Aspiration,” then somebody is seriously missing the mark.