Big Momma's House 2 (2006)

Big Momma's House 2 arrives in 2006 as the middle child of a trilogy nobody requested, and it carries itself with the confidence of a film that knows its audience will show up regardless. Martin Lawrence returns as FBI agent Malcolm Turner, who abandons a desk job and a pregnant wife to squeeze back into the latex and the padding, playing nanny to three affluent children in Orange County while surveilling their father, a software engineer with a computer worm and a bad boss. Critics were unimpressed. The public was not. It opened at number one and made its money back several times over, which tells us something about the republic that we may not wish to examine.

The cultural inventory here is thin, and what exists is accidental. The lead cast is largely African-American, a fact that reflects Lawrence's stature as a bankable star from a previous era of studio comedy, not any deliberate program of inclusion. Race is never mentioned. The film has no interest in it. The cross-dressing is pure disguise mechanics, a fat suit and a Southern accent deployed for slapstick, with no engagement of identity in any direction. The running joke is that an overweight woman is inherently hilarious, which places the film at the far opposite end of the body-acceptance spectrum. Women appear as a strict wife, a strict mother, and a cheerleader, and the script has nothing to say about any of them.

There is a villain, a corporate chief executive scheming to sell backdoor access to government databases, which supplies a faint whiff of boardroom malfeasance. The film does not follow through. No system is indicted, no wealth is interrogated, and the resolution restores everyone to their comfortable positions. Climate concerns do not appear. Neurodivergence does not appear. History is left alone. The whole affair is a lowbrow slapstick exercise with no sermon to deliver and no lesson to impart, which is at least honest about its intentions. A sequel that knows it is a sequel. Nothing more.