‘The Honeymooners’

Based on Jackie Gleason’s highly stylized, blue-collar affectionate TV show, the film is all icing and no cake.

By: Elise Nakhnikian

Ralph Kramden, Cedric the Entertainer (right) juggles his job as a bus driver (below) with get-rich schemes to provide for his wife, Alice (Gabrielle Union, left), in The Honeymooners.

   As Ralph Kramden (Cedric the Entertainer) kissed Alice (Gabrielle Union) in front of the Brooklyn Bridge toward the end of The Honeymooners, daylight faded into night and an oversized moon loomed into sight, just like the one from the credits of the original TV show. The woman sitting behind me snickered. "That’s not realistic!" she said.
   Well, no, it’s not — and it’s not meant to be. But neither is anything else in this shiny piece of junk, which is part of what makes it so lifeless.
   Like all sitcoms, Jackie Gleason’s TV show was highly stylized, with its slapstick, its punchlines and its taglines ("to the moon, Alice!"), but that wasn’t the whole story. Like all great sitcoms, it earned its laughs by creating characters you can’t help but care about and putting them in situations that reveal their nature, illuminating a few home truths about human behavior in the process.

   The movie, on the other hand, is pure stylization, all icing and no cake.
   The TV series, which was based on Gleason’s memories of his working-class boyhood, was an affectionate but unsentimental portrait of blue-collar life. Fans loved the Kramdens and their best friends and neighbors, Ed and Trixie Norton, the way they loved their own friends and relatives: as much for their weaknesses and quirks as for their sympathetic or admirable traits. The movie is one generation removed from reality, based on TV characters rather than real people. And while Gleason had things to say about class in America, the makers of the movie don’t seem to have anything on their minds except milking more profits from a studio-owned franchise.
   The most original idea they had was making the main characters African-American and setting the action in the present. Other than that, the basics remain the same. Ralph is, as he puts it, "a entre-pen-oo-er," constantly hatching harebrained schemes and getting himself and Ed into trouble. Alice is his perpetually exasperated but loving wife, who longs for a house of her own. Ed (Mike Epps) is Ralph’s sweet-tempered, none-too-bright sidekick, and Ed’s wife Trixie is as loyal to Alice as Ed is to Ralph. And Ralph is still always picking a fight, if not with Alice then with the equally long-suffering Ed.
   Casting Cedric the Entertainer in the part Gleason originated was a good idea too, since the comedian’s bulk, gift for slapstick and obvious love of playing bombastic self-promoters should have made him ideal for the part. But this is Ralph Lite. Hobbled by a formulaic, feel-good script, Cedric’s Ralph is more teddy bear than wounded grizzly.
   On TV, though, Ralph never stopped cooking up "surefire" get-rich-quick plans and Alice was always putting aside a little money in hopes of building a nest egg. The pragmatic Alice knew they’d never escape their shabby little Brooklyn apartment, and we viewers knew she was right. The movie tosses that central truth over the Kramdens’ fire escape to follow the obligatory Hollywood arc. The two couples achieve Alice’s dream of middle-class home ownership, buying a picture-perfect duplex and moving in together. Even Ed and Ralph’s friendship, which remained frozen in the amber of perpetual adolescence on TV, has to show growth here, with Ed making Ralph promise to stop bullying him.
   Everything would be forgiven if the thing were just funny. Lord knows it tries to be, but nearly all the routines are stillborn. Epps does some entertaining business at a pool table, and some of Cedric’s bits coax out a smile, but the only time this movie really moves is when John Leguizamo is onscreen.
   Leguizamo, who plays the sleazy, motormouth trainer for a greyhound Ralph and Ed decide to race after finding it in a dumpster, seems to have entered the movie’s airless world from a whole different plane, like the human detective who finds himself in Jessica Rabbit’s Toontown. His improvised-sounding riffs, most of which have nothing to do with the labored plot, are by far the funniest thing in it.
   Hearing him toss off lines like "I don’t want to marry her for her money, but I don’t know how else to get it" took some of the sting out of sitting through the rest of the movie. But if I’d thought they could have done it, I’d have asked the box office to refund those two squandered hours of my life.
Rated PG-13. Contains vulgar humor and sexual innuendo.