The Honeymooners

John Schultz’s The Honeymooners – the new comedy vehicle for Cedric The Entertainer – faces a double obstacle in appealing to UK audiences. The British know its star – if we know him at all – mainly through an uninspiring string of comedy features, the most recent of which, Johnson Family Vacation (2004), bypassed our cinemas for DVD. Similarly, despite its haloed status in the history of US television, the 1950s CBS sitcom that inspired the movie will be unfamiliar to any British viewers who missed its belated run on BBC2 from 1989 to 1991.

An antidote to the prevailing middle-class TV comedies of the era, The Honeymooners was a post-war phenomenon for Americans, who responded enthusiastically to its unique blue-collar milieu and the convincingly volatile and down-to-earth marriage between bus-driving would-be entrepreneur Ralph Kramden and his wife Alice. Elements of the show would be recognisable even for the uninitiated, particularly Jackie Gleason’s iconic personification of Kramden, the bumbling but aspiring everyman and model for countless subsequent sitcom husbands – from Fred Flintstone to Homer Simpson.

Schultz’s film establishes affection for the show with a pre-millennial prologue in which Kramden meets and woos his wife-to-be under effulgent New York lights. Two divergences from the original are explicit. Of these, the switch to an African-American cast is the more radical, while the contemporary update is more expected. The series’ more dated specifics are also ironed out, with the modernisation adroitly avoiding the dubious implications of Kramden’s blustery domestic threat to send Alice ‘to the moon’ (the show’s most famous catch-phrase); it is adapted to a more benign promise of future pastures: ‘I'll take you to the moon, Alice.’

But such a trip occurs neither for Alice nor the viewer. Instead, The Honeymooners oscillates wearingly between scenes of bickering and saccharine reconciliation. The Entertainer is appropriately amiable in the Gleason role, but the script rarely transcends idiocy. After a swift segue to the present day, we find the now-married couple scraping a living in a Brooklyn apartment that reverberates at the passing of trains outside their kitchen. The film would have been boosted by some imaginative art direction here. The sitcom’s sets were defined by their urgent, live-TV austerity; Schultz’s film offers nothing comparable, opening out the action into the city’s streets, sewers and racetracks without acquiring any flavour.

Kramden’s scheme to make money racing an abandoned mutt enables John Leguizamo’s ne’er-do-well dog-trainer Dodge to run away with some of the better lines, but fails to sustain feature-length interest when punctuated only by vapid set pieces. A ball shoots off a pool table hitting a bystander with amplified effect; a bogey is surreptitiously dropped into a trophy at the dog racers’ party; a chicken dinner is secretly smothered with cayenne pepper but then eaten by the wrong person. This is how the film attempts to squeeze laughs from an audience already wishing the honeymoon over.

This review features in the October 2005 issue of Sight & Sound.