The groom, the perpetual "playa" Roland (Taye Diggs, from Go) has gone missing, leaving a houseful of agitated mothers and bridesmaids, and his best friends Slim (RichardT. Jones) and Mike (Omar Epps) have to track him down (quickly accomplished) and whip him into ceremony shape. This takes forever, or at least a couple of hours, because everywhere the three go -- the convenience store, the Laundromat, the pizza place -- they are inspired by another "Hey, you remember when we…" flashback, another tale of coming up in "the Wood" during the '80s, the early days of rap music and the Crips and Bloods. There's plenty of mellow R&B on the soundtrack and only a taste of era hip-hop (Biz Markie, anyone?), but Famuyiwa nails the mood, fashion, and lingo and playfully picks at the tension and violence, playing it cool and goofy, using an Eazy-E-looking Crip thug as comic relief. (The thug has the bright idea of a rap album devoted to smoking dope but dismisses it: It'll neversell.)
There is, of course, something heartwarming and fun about three great-looking guys sitting in a pizza place slapping hands and throwing their heads back, howling about what they did back in the day. But here it's an image, a moment, a screen-captured snapshot, and the script offers nothing to back it up -- only some occasionally funny dead-on banter and overlong junior-high anecdotes (that time the condom broke! that time we paid you a dollar to grab that girl's booty!). The complete lack of momentum or meaning is disappointing because you really want to like these guys. Epps, Diggs, and Jones are such a handsome, likable trio and spend most of the film in snappy tuxedos (and one scene completely naked). But once you get past that, the meat of the moment -- We're grown men here. Now what? -- is ignored, and nothing that happens does so for a reason.
The Wood wants to be a younger, blacker Diner but fails to capture the pathos and friction of that time when young men start drifting apart, when so-called real life begins. Roland's in turmoil about it, drunk, tracking down his old girlfriend, but we never know why. The constant, tedious flashbacks illuminate nothing in the present, and even though Roland is the plot's linchpin, he's barely in this. By the end we learn nothing of him, his bride, or their relationship. Most of the flashbacks and the movie itself tell the tale of young Mike (Sean Nelson) wooing his high-school girlfriend (Malinda Williams), mixed with high-school sex antics and witty bored-teen banter. A few scenes turn embarrassing life moments into mild comedy, covering some of the same ground as the more skillful and focused American Pie, but the levels of heart and raunch never even out, and the whole thing feels flat from one end to the other.
It's too bad, really. Epps has an inviting mug and begins by delivering the tale in a homespun let-me-tell-ya-'bout-it manner. The problem is, it's not his story. Or shouldn't be. Despite Famuyiwa's mastery of local dialect and humor, he delivers a linear and derivative script, and scenes drag on and on. And on. Some of the banter is perfect, though, and a convenience-store speech on the benefits of Tic Tacs over larger mints is fairly clever, though, again, it takes us nowhere.
The movie comes from the burgeoning MTV Films, which had until now a good (or at least interesting) track record, with high-spirited, solid if not stellar manifestos on youth (Varsity Blues, Election) or with stuff that's at least loud and ambitiously awful (200Cigarettes, Dead Man on Campus). If the films aren't "good," at least they make a lot of noise. What's surprising about a perfectly nice, unremarkable effort such as The Wood is that it ends up being the worst thing a movie, especially an MTV movie, can be: boring.
