Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins

Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins isn’t like most Martin Lawrence movies; there’s a surfeit of deftly sketched supporting roles and a distinctly humane air to the proceedings.

Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins turns out to be formulaic and broad but also skillfully paced and big-hearted, with a sharp cast of comics that makes the most of a sunny script.

Martin Lawrence is funnier than he's been since … nearly forever. And, surprisingly, he mostly accomplishes this playing the straight man.

Funny, inviting, and just a wee bit over the top, Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins is a delightful surprise.

If you thought National Lampoon's Vacation films were at least okay, then Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins is a decent enough way to spend two hours.

As far as a genial comedy goes -- with too many sex jokes to be family-friendly -- viewers could do much worse in the dog days of movies before summer.

Takes some of today's funniest black comics and sets them loose.

Surprise, surprise: Roscoe Jenkins, formulaic though it may be, is funnier and more tender than you’d ever expect.

A predictable but mildly entertaining comedy about going home again.

Malcolm D. Lee knows exactly who his target audience is and if his movie's plot elements don't always gel, they'll at least nail that audience at all its emotional soft spots.

For an aggressively stupid slapstick comedy, Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins is pretty funny.

Despite its narrative staleness and an indulgently long runtime, it's still not half bad, largely because it places an absolute premium on brash, bawdy humor.

The ensemble comedy Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins shows some real savvy in appropriating the Tyler Perry formula while smoothing out the rough edges.

Thanks to a spirited supporting cast, you can call parts of Roscoe Jenkins genuinely funny, especially compared with such Lawrence fare as Big Momma's House.

Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins imagines slapstick farce as feel-good dramedy, which is to say, it's an unhappy (and largely unfunny) marriage of two movie types that don't really go together.

Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins has enough characters, and conflicts, for more than one movie.

Be warned that what looks to be a family comedy pushes its PG-13 rating to the edge with blatant sexual references and creatively crude sexual metaphors.

It's okay for a handful chuckles, but ultimately it's imminently forgettable.

Jenkins suffers from an epic and disappointing case of schizophrenia; it’s capable at times of real subtlety and warmth and humanity but not confident enough in itself to stay away from fart jokes or empty acts of sassiness for very long.

Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins is a mediocre movie, but with enough brilliant laughs to make it worth seeing.

A large, talented cast is mostly wasted in Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins.

In the rare moments when the ensemble just gets to hang out and act like a family, you see what the movie could have been -- a bawdy, not brainless, comedy about all the complications of being part of a big brood.

A sweet, good-natured comedy, but it's also slow as molasses and completely predictable, both of which make sitting through it occasionally frustrating and ultimately unsatisfying.

In Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins, Martin Lawrence goes back to his roots. No, silly, not his hometown -- pratfalls and crass bootie-humor! Just like old times.

As a rule I don't mind broad humor. But the widescreen isn't ample enough to fit the jokes here.

Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins is a raunchy family comedy with more actors than the thin script can hold.

Spiking sentimental family values with crude hilarity isn't the recipe for an award winner, but it will feed crowds hungry for a good time.

The big laughs will cancel out the over-familiar and overly drawn out, the life lessons lost to make way for an off-color giggle.

This is one of those your-roots-are-showing family circuses where just about everybody seems like a clown.

It's a cynical attempt to plunder your wallet with broad buffoonery you can see for free on TV.

Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins overstays its welcome by about 30 minutes.

Lee knows how to assemble a name cast and let them merrily mix it up, but at nearly two hours, Roscoe Jenkins is too long.

Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins reinforces the sense that movies are not about real life but about other movies.

Roscoe relies on some tired clichés of the South. Cousins lust after one another, chitlins are the meal of choice, and everyone speaks in drawls that sound inspired by The Dukes of Hazzard.

It's an attempt at Southern comfort that generates nothing but discomfort for two long, agonizing hours.

Screenwriter/director Malcolm D. Lee (Roll Bounce) takes too much time developing comic situations, and has to rush to wrap up the main story line in about 15 minutes.

Actors such as Michael Clarke Duncan, Mo'Nique, Mike Epps and Cedric the Entertainer have been persuaded by writer-director Malcolm D. Lee to do crass routines that should have gone out with minstrel shows.

It's pretty clear where this is headed, and the sentimental ending is what you'd expect.

A groundbreaking achievement in blandness, the film has nothing other than a few ethnic references to distinguish it from the next lazy family comedy from Steve Martin.

Writer-director Malcolm D. Lee wraps a soft and gooey message in a thick crust of crass slapstick.