This week's cinematic setback to race relations, "Malibu's Most Wanted," features Jamie Kennedy's incredibly irritating Brad "B-Rad" Gluckman character — a privileged white kid who thinks and acts like a ghetto gangsta rapper — from the young comedian's WB network show, "JKX: The Jamie Kennedy Experiment."
To say that B-Rad is hardly tolerable for more than the length of a TV comedy skit is to state what should have been obvious to everyone responsible for this full-length feature. But it must also be noted that, somewhere along the line, someone did take a little responsibility . . . to make the movie kind of funny, anyway, if not ever excusable.
It's a small trash-culture miracle, really, that this thing eventually throws out the number of good laughs that it does. Even more so, considering that in the film's first half-hour any hope of enjoyment is extinguished.
B-Rad and his crew are all spoiled kids (even the token Muslim is the son of rich Arabs, which proves a great setup for one of the film's biggest giggles — a joke, by the way, that would have been met with dead silence a month ago). They go around their well-heeled beach community speaking incomprehensibly and demanding respect from oblivious old ladies who work at scented-candle shops.
A problem arises, though, when B-Rad's father, Bill (Ryan O'Neal), runs for governor — and his son decides to help. The lad's hip-hop campaign tactics quickly alienate white voters. So Bill's manager Tom Gibbons (Blair Underwood, shrewdly playing it as white as Kennedy does black) hatches one of the lamer movie plots of the century: He secretly hires a pair of black actors to "kidnap" B-Rad, take him to Compton and scare the ebony out of him.
Played by Taye Diggs and Anthony Anderson, Sean and PJ are, respectively, graduates of Juilliard and the Pasadena Playhouse. The film's first hints of amusement involve them finding their characters and similar thespian nonsense before recruiting PJ's actual 'hood-dwelling cousin Shondra ("Scary Movie's" Regina Hall) to entice B-Rad and provide her crib as a holding pen.
All the black actors appear to be having a great time subverting whatever movie stereotypes their characters stand for.
Director John Whitesell, a legit theater and superior TV sitcom veteran, doesn't show much of a flair for the filmmaking niceties here. But he does apply good comic timing and a knack for balancing ridiculous situations with edgy urgency.
"Malibu's Most Wanted" is rated PG-13 for scenes of violence (gunplay, slapstick and explosive mayhem), occasional use of strong profanity, crude sexual slang terms and racial epithets, and brief drug content (references to drug use). Running time: 84 minutes.