When a friend suggested we watch the 2010 version I was ambivalent, which is a big impressive word that really just means "meh." I like Chris Rock's stand up, he's witty and consistently hilarious on stage, but that doesn't mean the movie will be just as funny. While an improv master like Robin Williams can ad-lib and add his own humor to the script, any comic is still leaning on the rest of the cast and the actual screenplay to pull the movie together. And Martin Lawrence and Tracy Morgan are funny, but they need the right setting for their humor to shine. This movie has the right setting.
I was laughing out loud in the first five minutes, when the funeral home delivers the wrong casket (complete with thew wrong body) for a home viewing. "This hardly ever happens," the young funeral director explains to the distraught children of the deceased. "This is not Burger King, you can't just mess up my order!"
And then there's the scene-stealing James Marsden, fiance to one of the mourning family members, who accidentally ingests a powerful hallucinogen on the way to the funeral and ends up naked on the roof. And then it gets weird...
A midget shows up at the funeral, eager to speak to the deceased's children. Why he wants to talk to them and what happens as a result of the conversation is definite spoiler material, so I'm not going into detail, but it's damn funny.
There are few movies that have made me laugh out loud so hard and so consistently from the beginning to the end of the film...The Hangover, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Airplane, Arthur (the original), Animal House, Monty Python and the [Anything]...The 2010 version of Death at a Funeral holds rank for me as one of the all-time comedy greats. If you haven't seen this yet, rent it ASAP. You will laugh. You may be disgusted with yourself at some of the things you are laughing at, but believe me, laugh you will...
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