Friday

It's not really that FRIDAY is a film that employs every possible stereotype about black people with its storyline, or that it uses bad, speachifying statements on adversity within idiocy, or that everyone in the film is an idiot that makes FRIDAY a bad movie. Rather, it's the laziness that caused these secondary problems that is so pervasive. The film begins, oddly, with Ice Cube playing an unemployed black man who is still living with his idiot parents and bossy sister. He is unemployed (obviously?) because he stole from his last job and was fired on Thursday, which was his day off. Now it's Friday, and in his house and everyone gets ready and talk about nothing in particular, Ice Cube's character (as his name is not impressionable enough to remember) eats cereal, but with no milk. This leads to the only good joke in the film, where Ice Cube's stoner, drug dealer friend who is so odd that he could not possibly exist, tells Ice Cube that he doesn't have anything in his house that fits with anything else. "You got peanut butter but no jelly, crackers but no cheese, cereal but no milk!" In the morning as Ice Cube looks over his cereal and complains to his parents even though he is still living in their house and eating up their food anyway, his father demands that he look for work, leaves for his job (a dogcatcher), returns after being bitten in the ass after being gone for 20 minutes, and sits around the house for the rest of the day. This is the kind of laziness that FRIDAY has, where, just to have him deliver a supposedly profound statement about adversity later, he returns home after being at work for 20 minutes. Not only that, but he never questions Ice Cube about why he didn't look for work. Instead, Ice Cube and the stoner / dealer friend from earlier, laze about smoking weed and looking at weird people across the street. Again: laziness. This film has no plot. Nothing happens for a good hour, and then Ice Cube and the friend realize that they smoked so much weed, that the dealer from whom it came from expects his money's worth because the duo were supposed to sell the weed, not smoke it. For a movie that isn't about anything, you would think that FRIDAY could be slightly funny, but it is so mired in an alternate reality where things are odd and that means funny, that it is not only obnoxious and juvenile, but weird and obliquely offensive. Never does the film push it in your face that everyone is unemployed or a drug dealer or an idiot, but when you get an hour into it, that realization slowly occurs. Also, it's not like Ice Cube is some great exception to this, and any payoffs of laughter or plot occur so late in the film that any sane or sober person would have walked out on this lazy farce to have seen them.
Friday: ★1/2