Wayans continues his pattern of creating movie simulacra - calling them "parodies" or even "spoofs" puts far too fine a point on it - whereby we're supposed to laugh because we recognize the thing that is being reenacted.

As with other staples of the screen-parody genre, the comic bull's-eyes arrive only intermittently.

Wayans is ... incapable of limiting himself to parodying one movie at a time, tossing in riffs on Whiplash, Magic Mike, and Zero Dark Thirty to varying degrees of success.

The movie's mean-spiritedness becomes even more painful than the dippiness of the source material.

Predictable but unexpectedly enlightened.