Something old, something new, a whole lot borrowed

Well, someone has gone and made “My Big, Fat Black/Hispanic Wedding.” And it’s a big, fat flop.

“Our Family Wedding” is a remedial lesson in race relations, a film for people who find “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” fresh and full of insight for our time. Judging by the way people were laughing in the theater, apparently it’s also supposed to be a comedy.

But really, can a movie with humor this atrocious, this poorly conceived, this ineptly rendered truly be considered a comedy?

Lance Gross and America Ferrera are a nice and strikingly handsome young couple who are in love and want to get married -- in three weeks, yet. But they haven’t told their parents yet because -- get this -- Gross is black and Ferrera is Hispanic!

Excuse me for a moment while I laugh myself silly.

The mid-’60s fun just keeps on rolling when the fathers (one is played by Forest Whitaker and the other by Carlos Mencia, but I’m not going to tell you which is which) turn out not to approve of the mixed marriage. They don’t like each other either, due to an early confrontation that is so torturously conceived that you cringe and feel embarrassed for the actors, particularly Whitaker.

It’s not the last time you feel that way. But soon you stop feeling bad for the actors and start taking pity on yourself. After all, they’re getting paid to be there. But we actually spend money to watch the scene with the frisky billy goat, the Worst Softball Game Ever Filmed (seriously, if you don’t know anything about the game, don’t try to film it) and the wedding-cake food fight that is so appalling they actually do it twice.

Writers Wayne Conley and Malcolm Spellman have concocted an extraordinarily unremarkable script (“I fell in love. It changes things. It doesn’t change who you are”) that posits a Los Angeles in which members of different races have never met each other.

Rick Famuyiwa’s direction is as haphazard as the writing, lurching awkwardly from one situation to the next with little sense of timing or logic. At his very worst, he shows a wedding reception that lasts so long it feels as if it were shot in real time.

No, that isn’t the worst. The worst is that softball game with the pitcher who pitches for both teams, except when she doesn’t, and the third baseman who plays left field. That’s the worse scene. But it has a lot of competition for the claim.