Guess Who [WS]

Director: Kevin Rodney Sullivan Kevin Rodney Sullivan

Overview

A man gets a very big surprise when he meets his prospective son-in-law in this comedy. Percy Jones (Bernie Mac) is the understandably proud father of Theresa (Zoe Saldana), a beautiful and intelligent young woman living in New York City. When Percy learns that his daughter is dating someone and things are getting serious, he decides to do some research, and learns that her beau is a solid businessman. Percy arranges to meet the young man, but is a bit taken aback when he comes face to face with Simon Green (Ashton Kutcher) -- Percy and his wife are African-American, and Simon is very, but very Caucasian. When it becomes clear that Simon and Theresa's relationship is likely altar-bound, Percy finds himself suddenly full of misgivings about the young man, especially since Simon tends to get rather clumsy when he's nervous. Guess Who was loosely adapted from the 1967 hit Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, though the race of the prospective father and son have been swapped, and the original film's comic undercurrent has been pushed to the forefront.

Product Details

Release Date:	08/02/2005
UPC:	0043396101135
Original Release:	2005
Rating:	PG-13
Source:	SONY PICTURES
Region Code:	1
Presentation:	[Wide Screen]
Sound:	[Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround]
Language:	English
Time:	1:45:00
Sales rank:	23,860

Special Features

Closed Caption;Deleted scenes with optional director's commentary; Gag reel; Love Is the Melody: the Making of Guess Who; Director's feature commentary

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Bernie Mac	Percy Jones
Ashton Kutcher	Simon Green
Zoe Saldana	Theresa
Judith Scott	Marilyn Jones,Actor
Hal Williams	Howard Jones
Kellee Stewart	Keisha Jones
RonReaco Lee	Reggie
Paula Newsome	Darlene
Phil Reeves	Actor
Sherri Shepherd	Actor
Nicole Sullivan	Actor
Jessica Cauffiel	Actor
JoNell Kennedy	Actor,Actor
Niecy Nash	Actor
Denise Dowse	Actor
Richard Lawson	Actor
J. Kenneth Campbell	Actor
Robert Curtis Brown	Dante
Chad Gabriel	Waiter
Alex Morris	Preacher
Amanda Tosch	Dante's Wife
Lisa Arch	Woman at Elevator
Robert Curtis-Brown	Dante
John Murphy	Composer

Technical Credits

David Ronn

Jay Scherick

Peter Tolan

William Rose

Kevin Rodney Sullivan	Director
David Ronn	Screenwriter
Jay Scherick	Screenwriter
Peter Tolan	Screenwriter
Jason Goldberg	Producer
Erwin Stoff	Producer
Jenno Topping	Producer
William Rose	Screenwriter
Joseph M. Caracciolo	Executive Producer
Steven Greener	Executive Producer,Executive Producer
Betty Thomas	Executive Producer,Casting
Tyler Foell	Special Effects
Douglas Arnold	Sound Effects
Raul A. Bruce	Sound Effects
Alison Fisher	Sound Effects
Todd Harris	Sound Effects
Matthew Harrison	Sound Effects
Ashton Kutcher	Producer
Greg Russell	Sound/Sound Designer
Kevin O'Connell	Sound/Sound Designer

Editorial Reviews

At the time Guess Who hit theaters, studios were spitting out ill-conceived remakes at a clip of one per month. Kevin Rodney Sullivan's film bucks that trend in a refreshing way: it revisits only the basic structure of its source material, and there's an actual ongoing relevance to the hot-button issues explored in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Flip-flop the races, sprinkle in believable characters and scenarios, and -- voilà -- a surprise hit (70 million dollars domestic) for two actors with checkered film resumés. The key to Guess Who is that it takes pains to construct a real family at its center, one that's uneasily transformed by this outsider (Ashton Kutcher, whose choppy white-guy haircut is the only thing in the movie that can truly be called "bad"). Sure, Bernie Mac's Percy Jones resembles the grumbling patriarch from the actor's eponymous sitcom, but his relationships with his wife and daughter (the superlative Judith Scott and Zoe Saldana) round him into someone far removed from the sitcom realm. Sullivan and his screenwriters consistently win points by going small and warm, rather than large and mean. Unlike the other prevailing domestic comedies of the day (Meet the Fockers comes to mind), Guess Who rarely allows its set pieces to cross over into slapstick ridiculousness. Unfortunately, one notable exception -- when Mac catches Kutcher trying on lingerie, a bit staged just to throw yuks into the trailer -- may damage the film's chances of being seen by an intelligent audience. A much better and more typical indication of its IQ is the uncomfortable scene in which Simon (Kutcher) gets goaded into reciting racist jokes at the dinner table. Unusually perceptive for a populist comedy, this sequence underscores the fine lines between humor and insult, intimacy and estrangement, and prejudice and understanding.