weak

“A Low Down Dirty Shame” was a chance for a third member of “In Living Color” to expand on his appeal in 1994, and being that he was the creator of the show and of the very funny exploitation comedy “I’m Gonna Get You Sucka”, I think it was safe to say we should have expected more.


But Keenen Ivory Wayans’ “Shame” doesn’t really know what it’s trying to be. It’s action movie cliches, which could be fine if done a certain way, but here it’s done in one that feels like they’ve been copied and pasted. The film has little personality of its own and also erratically tries to make it serious while also going for broad satire. It’s a mess.


His movie has him not only writing and directing but also starring as Shame, a PI tasked with tracking down an old girlfriend (Salli Richardson) who knows the whereabouts of an old nemesis of Shame’s, played by Andrew Divoff.


It occurs to me now that I didn’t even care what evil scheme the stereotypical Puerto Rican bad guys are trying to pull off in this movie. Maybe because the lead just comes off as vaguely threatening at best while everyone else is just assigned the “henchmen” role of participating in action sequences.


And Wayans gives us car chases, shoot outs, twists, and so on, but all shot with a level of detachment. It’s routine stuff that seems there more to set up a punchline to follow rather than anything exciting. What’s worse is that the punchlines are nothing worth waiting for.
For the most part this is Wayans falling back on his weaker comic impulses, going after lazy targets like the very many jokes about super effeminate gays, or just trying and failing for topical racial humor, like a nothing scene where white supremacists attack a latino henchman. It’s not funny cause it’s not making fun of anything. It’s just showing hate.


What really hurts the movie is that there are no characters here. Wayans tries to come up with so many wisecracks and snide comebacks for this character that that’s pretty much all of his appeal.


Richardson is here to play sort of a femme fatale yet she too is also underserved as other than looking very beautiful there’s nothing particularly fatal or seductive about her. She seems mostly just pouty. And Jada Pinkett plays Shame’s Girl Friday, going over the top as this thugged out little elf who starts to grate quickly.

The pleasures of “Shame” are few and far between. A couple good gags aren’t enough to overcome a movie that is mostly just built on gags, and the hope it has more than a few of them. It doesn’t, which is a shame because Wayans has shown time and again he is better than this.