The Upside Breaks Ground That Green Book Doesn’t

The Upside, the new odd-couple dramedy starring Kevin Hart and Bryan Cranston, begins with a police chase. In an effort to cheer up his depressed friend Phillip (Cranston), convict-turned-caretaker Dell (Hart) races the white man’s sleek black Porsche through Manhattan with the latter in the passenger seat, his lead foot growing heavier as the siren pierces the night air. When the cops finally catch up to Dell, they force him out of the car and push him face-down onto the hood. If you watched Widows, BlacKkKlansman, Blindspotting, or The Hate U Give last year—or, hell, paid attention to the news sometime in the past few years—you might find yourself bracing for the worst, whether you define that as the prospect of yet another black man suffering state violence or a ham-fisted lesson by a white filmmaking team on that subject. In fact, neither happens. Dell talks Phillip, who’s paralyzed below the neck, into faking a medical episode, and off they go, a pair of merry pranksters whose racial feel-goodery has next to nothing to do with real-world stakes.

from Stories from Slate http://bit.ly/2Cipthh