Amos And Andrew

Amos And Andrew

While you are hurt, it can be difficult to laugh. However, that is exactly what “Amos and Andrew” asks of us. The comedy is about an affluent African-American man who becomes mistaken for a thief simply because he is black. Having purchased a weekend home on an exclusive island enclave, the man is visiting it for the first time when the neighbors see him and immediately assume he’s there to rob them.

A lot of people won’t find this joke funny. And while the movie does try hard to teach its lesson that you can’t judge a man by his color the humor is undercut by the sadness of the situation. It’s not a bad movie so much as misguided: There are plenty of funny moments and some good performances, but all the same.

The rich black man is played by Samuel L. Jackson, who was so memorable as the drug-addled older brother in “Jungle Fever.” Now he plays a completely different character: a wealthy businessman who naturally assumes he’s under attack when the local police surround his house.

After receiving a complaint from nosy neighbors (Michael Lerner and Margaret Colin), the politically ambitious police chief (Dabney Coleman) goes into siege mentality mode and tells reporters that he believes there’s a hostage situation taking place in there. One of his hotheaded officers (Brad Dourif) actually starts shooting at Jackson. When Coleman realizes his mistake, though, he knows he’s in hot water unless he can come up with some kind of fix real quick.

This is where the movie finally picks up steam, as Coleman recruits a two-bit criminal in the local jail (Nicholas Cage) and orders him to playact as a house invader pretending to take Jackson hostage so that their phony story will hold up. The relationship between Jackson and Cage is really at the heart of this movie; they discover things about each other while trying to figure out how the hell they got into this situation together.

The makers of “Amos and Andrew” are sort of trapped by their plot. I’m sure they mean well by making a movie that shows how white Americans (or at least the silly neighbors in this film) can jump to conclusions about blacks. But this is a movie that needs to be either more innocent about race in America, or less so. It sets up an ugly situation and then treats it with sitcom tactics. Either the humor should have been angrier and more hard-edged, or else the filmmakers should have backed off entirely.

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