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88Despite its flashy cinematography and colorful sets, it contains a great deal that is serious about growing up in America today.
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40The naughty-yet-nurturing tone is certainly unusual, but in working so hard to be the adult who "gets" kids yet lectures them at the same time, he's ended up with a colorful but superficial mess.
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40It's a shame, though, that the movie also features stereotyped or retrograde attitudes towards Jewish, gay, and female characters. Perhaps Van Peebles' kids could school their dad on the virtues of across-the-board respect.
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38The script suffers from blandness and aimlessness.
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75While We the Party can be insensitive, or blind, to the misogyny and homophobia of the general culture (the token gay teen is a finger-snapping, head-bobbing fashionista), it takes the issues of race and class quite seriously.
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Apr 4, 201275Van Peebles compensates for his stylistic clunkiness - the film overuses split screens and sometimes looks so bright, it could be a '90s sitcom - with funny, unexpected sparks of life.
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50Despite the filmmaker's obvious good intentions in trying to impart valuable life lessons to younger viewers, We the Party suffers from any number of problems, including uneven acting (talent isn't always hereditary); stereotypical characters and situations; and a manic visual style featuring the sort of split-screen obsession that felt outdated decades ago.
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50Other Van Peebleses also populate the movie, and all are serviceable enough as actors; it would be nice to see them in less earnest, more original material.
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Apr 3, 201240The movie spends almost as much time allowing the filmmaker, playing a progressive-minded teacher, to push his students to be better citizens by interviewing homeless people on skid row (!) as it does watching the younger generation trying to get some. It's an uneasy mixture of crude yukking and mixed-message uplift that satisfies on neither level.
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40This South Los Angeles-set dramedy flirts with terminal stereotypes and high-school movie cliches right and left.
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Apr 3, 201240Van Peebles's heart is probably in the right place, but his attempt to wed his kids' generational moment to a classic coming-of-age template falters in its message-obsessed execution.
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Apr 5, 201238With the raunch of "American Pie" and the heart of an after-school special, the comedy turns out to be a lot less than the sum of its parts.