The Best and Worst of Regina Hall

The "Best and Worst" series profiles the best and worst work of an actor starring in one of the week's new theatrical releases. This week I take a look at the filmography of "When the Bough Breaks" star Regina Hall.

Films starring Regina Hall that I've seen:
Scary Movie
Scary Movie 2
Malibu's Most Wanted
Scary Movie 3
King's Ransom
The Honeymooners
Scary Movie 4
First Sunday
Law Abiding Citizen
Death at a Funeral
About Last Night 
Vacation
Barbershop: The Next Cut

Best Performance: Barbershop: The Next Cut (2016)
Hall's sustained success in the industry has been in large put due to her work in large, ensemble comedies including the Scary Movie franchise and Death at a Funeral. After nearly two decades of honing her craft in the genre, Hall gave her career-defining performance in Barbershop: The Next Cut earlier this year. Hall's immense warmth and sharp comic timing allows Angie, the owner of the salon that merges with Calvin's (Ice Cube) barbershop, to be the film's most believable, empathetic character as well as a perfect sparring partner for Eddie (Cedric the Entertainer) and the rest of the eccentric personalities that hang around Calvin Jr.'s Barbershop. 

Worst Performance: King's Ransom (2005)
Hall was unfortunately repeatedly typecast after her breakout role as Brenda Meeks in the Scary Movie series. The lowest point of her "loud, obnoxious bitch" cycle came in the terrible Anthony Anderson-led vehicle King's Ransom. Hall basically plays the same character here as she did in Malibu's Most Wanted and Scary Movie, minus the good one-liners that made those roles passable. Thankfully, King's Ransom was one of the last films where she was forced to play such a shitty, annoying character and she has since gone onto consistently secure roles that better utilize her talent. 

Best Film: Malibu's Most Wanted (2003)
I fully understand why Malibu's Most Wanted is such a widely disliked movie. The humor is about as lowbrow as it gets, the protagonist B-Rad (Jamie Kennedy) is the type of over-the-top caricature that can become instantly grating and the film is satirizing a culture (hip-hop obsessed suburban white kids who wish they from the inner city) that most people are completely unaware of. However, none of those things stopped me from enjoying the hell of out Malibu's Most Wanted. It's consistently funny and mindless entertainment that does a good job of skewering a ridiculous cultural movement without ever veering into tasteless, offensive territory.     

Worst Film: First Sunday (2008)
First Sunday is a failure that just shouldn't have happened. Despite featuring a pair of comedic heavyweights in Ice Cube and Tracy Morgan in the lead roles, First Sunday is more concerned with pedaling out messages about the power of faith and forgiveness than generating laughs. Shame on Cube and Morgan for agreeing to appear in this atrocity and shame on the filmmakers for wasting top-end talent on such bad material.  

Thank you for reading this week's installment of "The Best and Worst of". Next week, I'll take a look at the best and worst work of  "Snowden" star Joseph Gordon-Levitt.