They approach Ray, the smoothest player they know, and offer him $5,000 to woo Eva, get her to fall in love with him, whisk her off to another city, and then dump her. The men figure Eva needs a man of her own.
She’s mean and shrewish, which in her line of work - she’s a health inspector - is a plus.
Eva doesn’t seem to like anyone, in fact. Eva doesn’t like her sisters’ men, even though they’re pretty decent guys. As eldest child, she looks out for her three sisters, who respect every word she says, especially when she’s dissing their husbands and boyfriends.
Is this a promise of dark comedy? Are we to see a story that actually ends in the death of its protagonist? I will only refer you to my previous assertion that this film ultimately follows all the normal conventions of romantic comedies.Īt any rate, we go back six months to before Ray ever met Eva. He shows us the three men who killed him, the three Dandridge sisters whom they are all either married to or dating, and the fourth Dandridge sister, Eva (Gabrielle Union), who Ray tells us is the one truly responsible for his demise. In narration, Ray (LL Cool J) tells us that he is dead. It avoids the template for a while, but by the end, it’s doing everything that every other film of its genre does, right down to the reconciliation that occurs in a public setting.īut it starts well. In fact, it is to be admired for being something that few films have found financial success at being: an African-American romantic comedy.Īlas, even without being a retread of other films, and even ignoring the glut in the marketplace, “Deliver Us from Eva” is still only slightly better than most of its kind. It is not the fault of “Deliver Us from Eva,” however, that there has been a slew of rom-coms in recent weeks. The movie critic has seen it all before - in this case, he has seen it three times in the past five weeks. Hence it is the movie critic who grows tiredest the fastest of films in which people either hate each other or like each other but under false pretenses, and in which hilarity is supposed to ensue but almost never does. The movie critic, however, sees all of them. The average person, you see, isn’t going to watch “Maid in Manhattan” AND “Two Weeks Notice” AND “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” AND “Deliver Us from Eva.” The average person, when faced with four romantic comedies being released within six weeks of each other, will see one, maybe two of them.
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