Eddie Murphy as Akbar and Jonah Hill as Ezra, who has dared to fall in love with Akbar’s daughter, in the new Netflix comedy You People.Netflix
- You People
- Directed by Kenya Barris
- Written by Kenya Barris and Jonah Hill
- Starring Jonah Hill, Eddie Murphy and Julia Louis-Dreyfus
- Classification R; 117 minutes
- Streaming on Netflix starting Jan. 27
Critic’s Pick
The new Netflix comedy You People will hit differently depending on just where you sit on the Kenya Barris-Jonah Hill entertainment axis.
If you identify with Barris’s racial, cultural and class preoccupations – the Black-ish showrunner, making his feature directorial debut here, is best-known for sitcoms that focus on affluent Black families encountering clueless, equally wealthy white people – then you will be entirely at home with the film’s Mohammed family, led by unsmiling patriarch Akbar (Eddie Murphy), who is introduced wearing a hoodie emblazoned with the words “Fred Hampton was murdered.”
If, however, you are more familiar and comfortable with Hill’s well-honed shtick – neurotic-stoner bro who is just a nice Jewish boy at heart – then you can slide right into following the follies of the Cohen clan, led by Shelley (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), who proclaims her Hispanic maid to be a “part of the family,” and whose son, Ezra (Hill), has dared to fall in love with Akbar’s daughter, Amira (Lauren London).
For my part, I’ll say that I’ve never related so deeply to a fictional character than when, during an early scene, Ezra thanks god (or rather “G-d,” in the Jewish tradition) after he finally gets to sit down during a marathon Yom Kippur synagogue service. I let loose a genuinely unforced laugh, and then a dozen or two more, over the course of the next two hours.
Murphy as Akbar, and Nia Long as Fatima, in sunny Los Angeles where You People is set.Netflix
Not a chuckle or a polite throat-clearing: These were hearty, full-strength guffaws that kept coming and coming as Barris and Hill took their simple premise – a 2023-era Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner – and laced it with enough sharp one-liners to punch up an entire year’s worth of other so-called Netflix comedies. This could be my Jewish High Holidays PTSD talking, but You People just might be the single funniest thing that the streaming giant has ever produced.
Story-wise, though, there isn’t much new in Barris and Hill’s screenplay. Which is fine. Boy (in this case a wannabe podcaster and self-proclaimed aficionado of Black culture) meets girl (an aspiring fashion designer sick of being set up with men hand-picked by her father). Boy and girl fall in love, plan for a future, and then meet each other’s families. Which is when the predictable disaster strikes, with Amira’s father disapproving of the Black culture-appropriating Ezra, while Ezra’s folks love the idea but not necessarily the ideals of diversifying their faux-progressive life.
Conflicts and awkwardness ensue, with any genuine struggles shaken off by the fact that everyone involved is beautiful and financially comfortable in the sunny, luxe environs of a plastic Los Angeles. (While Barris and Hill make a point of placing a distinct gap in class between Ezra’s and Amira’s families, visits to each set of parents’ homes – and the fact that who just might be asked to pay for their extravagant wedding never comes up – reveal that neither clan is exactly struggling.)
Still, the familiar and facile elements are drowned out – often, and loudly – by the impeccable comedic talents of Hill and Murphy, two performers whose very different styles clash and complement one another.
Hill is that same mensch with a heart of gold and an air of deep anxiety that he has portrayed across several Judd Apatow and Apatow-adjacent projects. He tosses out punchlines with a nimbleness that is frankly frustrating to watch – he makes it all look so easy.
Lauren London plays Amira, an aspiring fashion designer sick of being set up with men handpicked by her father.Netflix
Murphy, meanwhile, channels his bite through a slightly more straight-man façade than usual – this is more Beverly Hills Cop Murphy than, say, Nutty Professor Murphy – but can still inspire a deep, guttural laugh with a mere look. (Murphy is also, far as I can tell, only playing one character in You People, instead of his typical five or six hidden under layers of makeup.)
If you’ve already watched the trailer for You People, then you’ve already seen its more incendiary set-ups – Akbar and Shelley debating Louis Farrakhan, the comparisons between slavery and the Holocaust, stacking the horrors of antisemitism against those of anti-Black police brutality – yet there are a million different did-they-just-say-that cultural bombs dropped off in the film’s margins, too, that will prick and startle. Different audiences’ mileage will vary as to how successfully those provocations land, yet even the most sour-faced of moviegoers will crack a smile or two.
All of which will help distract not only from You People’s rather stale message – we can all get along, if we can shut up now and then – but also Barris’s occasionally odd directorial choices. It is one thing if you cannot figure out how to transition from one scene to the next, quite another to find a solution by inserting collages of L.A. cityscapes over and over again.
And when your narrative requires not one, not two, not three but four (!) separate stop-and-speech moments in which various characters vocalize their moral failures and the important lessons that they learned, then it’s time to get some sleep and revisit the script in the morning.
Also: No one should be able to cast David Duchovny (as Ezra’s dad) and Nia Long (as Amira’s mom) and then have them do … pretty much nothing. Okay, one more thing: Why ask Elliott Gould and Black-ish star Anthony Anderson to take time out of their busy lives to cameo here if you’re also going to give them lines that any anonymous day player could handle? Finally: As good as Louis-Dreyfus is with handling Shelley’s intentionally cringeworthy dialogue, the film never gives her matriarch as much depth or understanding as it does Akbar. She exists mostly as a counterpoint, not a character.
But at least now Hill – and Barris, too, why not – have something to atone for next Yom Kippur.