Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son

An FBI agent (Martin Lawrence) and his stepson (Brandon T. Jackson) witness a murder by a Russian gangster and have to go into hiding while they seek out the evidence to nail the bad guy. The catch is that the evidence is hidden on the campus of a girls’ school, so the agent has to disguise himself as a house mother and the boy as one of the students. The good news: It’s not as bad as it might have been. Director John Whitesell can’t do much with the script, but at least he and cinematographer Anthony B. Richmond give the movie a bright, clean look; Lawrence and Jackson have good comic rapport; and there are some infectious (if inconsequential) musical interludes. The bad news: All that goes for naught, defeated by the lame contrivances and stale drag jokes of Matthew Fogel and Don Rhymer’s screenplay.