Who do I have to blame for this atrocity? The most obvious answer would be Marlon Wayans. Actually, most questions asked why this horrible thing is happening could simply be answered, because Marlon Wayans did it. But he didn’t write or direct this train wreck, so maybe he can’t be fully responsible. When it comes down to it, there’s enough blame to go around for everyone involved with this, not just Marlon Wayans.
Instead, I think we might have to go all the way back to Eddie Murphy. Thanks to him and his penchant for dressing up like other characters, Eddie Murphy essentially made this genre popular with such comedies as Nutty Professor, Norbit and Coming to America.
Because of those films popularity, we were treated to what happens when anything gets popular. We get imitators. And more likely than not, the imitation is never as good as the thing they are copying.
Case and point anything by Tyler Perry.
But also on that list are the Wayans Bros., who gave us such classics as White Chicks and Little Man.
And now we can add Sextuplets to that ever expanding list.
They didn’t start the whole… what would you classify this genre as being? Black comedians dress up like other people genre? They didn’t create this, they only found a way to make it the worst possible example of it.
You know right out of the gate Sextuplets is going to have one fatal flaw and that’s the shitty writing.
They start the movie off with so much exposition, that I had to look away from the screen out of embarrassment. Marlon Wayans and his wife Marie get all their backstory out of the way in the first few seconds of the movie with no time to waste. They even mention in the most unnatural way, about 5 times I might add, that her father is a judge.
It seems bizarre that they keep bringing this up, but it makes sense I guess once they use his job position to move the story along. Still though, find a less clunky way to set that up. Don’t just randomly bring it up a bunch of times out of the blue in conversation. It makes it seem like dialogue from the first Resident Evil game.
Who actually wrote this… oh, that explains it. Rick Alvarez, the writer of such gems as Fifty Shades of Black and the terrible A Haunted House movies. He’s also the producer of just about every single terrible thing Marlon Wayans has starred in or slapped his name on.
It also looks like I was wrong, seems like Marlon Wayans did have a writing credit for Sextuplets. Maybe I can just blame him.
This marks the second Marlon Wayans Netflix film, the first being Naked, a film I actually enjoyed a lot. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but was decent enough that I couldn’t get mad at it.
It has a stuck in the same day scenario, but during one of the stunts, Marlon Wayans must have injured himself during a stunt involving a motorcycle, because throughout a majority of the film he has this giant swollen knot on his forehead, when continuity wise, it shouldn’t be there once the timeline resets.
As for Sextuplets, I didn’t really notice anything like that. Only the bad writing. Because this film managed to squeeze out maybe two possibly three laughs from me, I can’t save face and say this film has zero laughs. I’d be lying. But those laughs are so far and in between that they might as well have been flukes. What’s that saying? A broken clock is right twice a day.
Marlon Wayans plays Alan… and Russell and Dawn and Jaspar and Ethan and Baby Pete and Lynette, their mother. But the main character of the film is Alan, a soon to be father, married to Marie, whose father is a judge with deep connections.
Because Alan was adopted, he really doesn’t know much about any family health issues that might be hereditary. But they quickly drop that as an excuse to want to find his family and instead focus on, “I can’t be a good father until I find my own family”.
I get you want to follow a simple story formula, but when you follow it too closely, it plays out like a generic beat sheet, ticking off moment after moment, making your film tiresome and entirely predictable.
Because Marie’s father is a judge, who hates him for some reason, I mean, Alan I believe made partner at his greeting card company. I guess that’s still not good enough for her father. I don’t know what she does for a living. She only seems to have one job and that’s being pregnant. They might have mentioned something, most likely in more clunky dialogue, I just don’t remember.
Anyway, Alan receives his adoption papers and tracks his mom down only to find his weirdo obese shut-in twin brother Russell, who has a very bizarre relationship with cereal.
I haven’t had cereal in about 2 years, but each time I see a brand new cereal that’s just come out, I guess my inner Russell creeps out a bit. My favorite back in the day was Banana Nut Crunch. They stopped making it years ago, but eventually they brought it back about a couple of years ago, about the same time I stopped eating cereal or breakfast in general. Now they have chicken and waffles cereal, maple bacon donut cereal… c’mon! There’s even Marshmallow Peeps cereal! Okay, that last ne I’m less interested in trying. It’s more like a morbid curiosity like the Sour Patch cereal. How can that possibly be good?
Okay, I’m getting sidetracked by cereal of all things. Let’s focus more on the fat slob Russell who seems like he burns ladies to death when they laugh at his tiny penis. (Mandy reference)
He tells Alan that their mom died, but if I had to guess I’d say he pulled a Psycho and is keeping her dead decomposing body somewhere in the house, using it like a Real Doll.
And trust me, Russell is the kind of guy that would have a Real Doll. And most likely one made to look like his mother.
While biting into a hard candy, Alan breaks a tooth, but loses it in a vent on the floor of his dead mom’s bedroom. Reaching for his tooth in the vent, he discovers a bunch of other adoption papers and a newspaper celebrating the sextuplet’s birth.
Alan now has even more twins out there that he wishes to find, sparking Russell’s interest as well, now wanting to tag along.
The first twin on the list is their sister Dawn who happens to be in county lockup on an assault charge.
She’s about what you’d expect from Marlon Wayans by now. Think a younger more infuriating version of Madea.
She manages to con Alan out of 10k for her bond to bail her out of jail. After learning that their other twin, Baby Pete is dying in a hospital in another state, the three of them decide to pay him a visit.
But while getting there, Dawn gets in a fight with some trucker, leaving Alan with a broken nose.
They all end up at the same hospital, where they sign Alan up for a liver transplant without his knowledge. Baby Pete tricks Alan into signing the permission slip for the procedure, when he thinks he’s going under to help repair his nose.
Outraged, waking up finding his liver gone, or was it kidney… I can’t remember. Either way, Alan is pissed, especially when he learns that Baby Pete already took off with his new organ and the donation money helped raised for him.
Meanwhile, Jaspar, another twin, pays Alan’s life a visit, looking to steal his money. Think a tall Katt Williams. He sleeps with Alan’s boss and tricks Marie into thinking he’s Alan. She needs him to take a breast feeding class with her where his crudeness exposes him as a fake.
To make up for his bad behavior, he helps paint the baby’s room. But Marie starts to go into labor.
While arguing with Russell, Alan and his fat creepy introverted brother are taken hostage and tossed into a black unmarked van.
When they awake, they find themselves at the mercy of yet another twin, this time Ethan… okay, so to be honest, I could be mixing up these names. The Superfly con artist brother could be Ethan and the ginger one could be Jaspar. So who knows. I’d have to rewatch the film to check and see, and I really don’t want to do that.
Anyway, Alan and Russell have been taken by Jaspar, possibly Ethan, the ginger twin. Their family had a little Irish in them and poor Jaspar/Ethan got all of it.
He’s a CIA secret agent and was caught off guard by people looking into him. He isn’t so convinced that these two are related to him, so he plans to torture them to find out the truth.
The only thing that saves them is when the mom they thought to be dead arrives from vacation. Turns out Russell lied, because of course he did. You know right from the start this little weirdo is lying because he wants mommy all to himself. He found out he has a twin brother and the first thing he did was worry he’d want to eat his cereal. So yeah, you can go right ahead and check that box for predictability.
After possibly getting the hug he never received as a child, Ethan or possibly Jaspar let’s Alan and Russell go, just in time for them to rush to the hospital before Marie gives birth.
I knew from the very start this would end with them rushing to the hospital, because of course that’s the only thing they could come up with. Can we please stop with the “run to her” gimmick in films? And that’s what this is, it’s one iteration of the run to her and for some reason has become a gold standard for any terrible romantic comedy. Even my favorite romantic comedy “Don’t Tell Her it’s Me” ends with a run to her scene.
If you don’t know, the run to her scenario is where the main character has to rush to stop his love interest from leaving, most likely ending with them at an airport.
It pops up all the damn time and I absolutely hate it. I just saw it recently with the fucking awful Netflix film Otherhood.
Please, future screenwriters reading this who happen to be working on a romantic comedy, I beg you, I implore you, please retire the run to her shtick.
After breaking several traffic laws getting to the hospital on time, Alan and Russell are now being pursued by the police. Russell acts as the distraction while Alan makes it inside the hospital, only to be confronted by more police searching inside the building for him. He also gets to meet the twin he looks the most alike.
Wanting to do something for his brother, Jaspar, possibly Ethan exchanges clothes with Alan, rushing out to give himself to the cops so Alan can see the birth of his baby.
I’m shocked they didn’t decide to make the baby another Marlon Wayans character. So I applaud them for showing some restraint.
If there is one good thing I can say about the film it’s that I thought the makeup at least looked impressive. Nowadays you’re never sure if you’re looking at a prosthetic fat suit or just CGI. Either way, the makeup for all of Marlon Wayans’ characters, the ones with heavy visual differences, were all very impressive and believable.
However, that’s still not enough to give Sextuplets anything other than a SKIP IT rating.
Want EARLY access to our videos, uploads, and movie/script reviews? Members get them FIRST! Follow this link to our Discussion Forum.
And be sure to check out our Notes Service, where I give my detailed thoughts and suggestions on your script.
