MOVIE REVIEW
“COFFEE KAREEM”
Not Rated. On Netflix.
Grade: B
Netflix’s reprehensibly funny, odd-couple comedy “Coffee Kareem” — get it? — tells a Detroit-set story of a nerdy white military officer named James Coffee (Ed Helms of a “Hangover” films) and a misadventures he practice with a foul-mouthed 12-year-old son of his African-American partner Vanessa Manning (Taraji P. Henson of TV’s “Empire”), a nurse. Coffee and a eponymous Kareem (Terrence Little Gardenhigh of TV’s “Danger Force”) spend most of their time being followed on feet and in cars by gun-wielding, can’t-shoot-straight drug dealers right out of a comic chronicle of “Reservoir Dogs,” and they will all have we shouting even as we consternation if a film so full of happy panic jokes and licentious happy sex jokes should even be shown on a mainstream network.
Then again, we have gay in a over-the-top discourse of a likes of “Reservoir Dogs” auteur Quentin Tarantino, so it’s tough to clear being modest about such things in this case. We do, however, have a 12-year-old protagonist, whose dirty mouth competence need to be taped off by a EPA and ornate with bio-hazard warnings. we comprehend that all that we have remarkable so distant competence been interpreted as an endorsement. I’m not certain if it is, though we laughed frequently adequate to make it feel like it is.
Things get off to a unsure start for executive Michael Dowse (the unsatisfactory “Stuber”) in a array of scenes that demeanour like they were initial takes. Coffee has father issues. He is abused during a hire and called a b-word by Officer Watts (the pleasant Betty Gilpin of “The Hunt”), who has only done a large drug arrest. The station’s captain (David Alan Grier) busts a clearly unhandy Coffee down to trade cop. But when Kareem, who also has father issues, witnesses and films with his cellphone a murder of a Asian-American policeman by a dealers, a competition is on. At a same time, hurtful cops in a force make it seem like Coffee is a killer and that he has kidnapped a boy.
The screenplay by first-time underline author Shane Mack is full of humorous and not-so humorous jokes, vast epithets, unconstrained impertinence and shout-outs to “Blade,” “Alien 2,” “Lethal Weapon” and, we think, “White Heat.” You might have difficulty following it all. But we can be certain it is all headed in one instruction and that is someone’s behind. we don’t consider I’ve ever seen a film so spooky with that sold partial of a tellurian anatomy. Another square of anatomy creation an coming is a dismembered palm and wrist still trustworthy by shackles to a briefcase full of Benjamins.
As a “once earnest hip-hop artist”-tuned-drug play Johnson, RonReaco Lee delivers a large comic crash to a film. Character actor Andrew Bachelor (aka “King Bach,” “Fifty Shades of Black”) is another asset. Lee, Bachelor and William “Bigsleeps” Stewart are noted as a film’s dimwit crime trio. Henson is a means comic actor with consultant timing and a particular outspoken instrument. The young, though gifted Gardenhigh binds his possess with Helms.
By a end, Coffee has been humiliated, slapped repeatedly, shot in a shoulder and had his feet run over by a military cruiser. Of course, he’s going to go all “Rambo” with a assistance of a bottle of Jack and a handful of Oxys. Watch your … back, Coffee.
(“Coffee Kareem” contains profanity, licentious language, nakedness and violence.)