How Stella Got Her Groove Back

Starring: Angela Bassett, Taye Diggs, Whoopi Goldberg, Regina King, Suzzanne Douglas, Michael J. Pagan, Sicility Johnson, James Pickens Jr.
Directed by: Kevin Rodney Sullivan
Rating: R
Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance
1998

Times Seen:
Tim: 1

Summary: A highly successful businesswoman (Angela Bassett) travels to Jamaica, where she meets a young man (Taye Diggs) whom she falls for. Their very different backgrounds prove to be problematic, however.

Review:

Tim: I can't say I particularly liked anything about How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Even accounting for the fact that I'm not the key target demographic for this movie, the film is still pretty bad. It's absurd for a movie like this to be 2 hours, 4 minutes long. There's not nearly enough to support that run time. This movie needed to clock in closer to 1 hour, 40 minutes. The film would have benefited from cutting that much.

I'm not even sure exactly what this movie was trying to say. The main action happens when the protagonist, a workaholic type-A personality takes a rare vacation to Jamaica. There she meets a handsome islander and they have a vacation fling. The early part of this film felt like wish fulfillment for middle aged women. Leave the responsibilities of work and life and have an exciting, new relationship with someone much younger than you. The film starts to get lost after this point. She goes back to work, kind of continues the relationship, makes a return trip to Jamaica, and then the movie morphs into a more serious relationship drama. It looks at two very different people who are trying to sustain a relationship. The problem is that this aspect of the story is about as interesting as seeing a couple whisper fight at a nearby table at a restaurant- besides an initial jolt from seeing into someone else's relationship, there's not much to sustain our attention. The relationship between Stella and Shakespeare (and don't even get me started on that ridiculous name- Winston Shakespeare. Come on) is truly not all that interesting at all. I felt no real connection to the characters and didn't really care whether they ended up together or not.

I suppose Angela Bassett is decent enough in the lead role, but I wouldn't say she does a good job. There's too many scenes where her acting is forced. She seems uncomfortable, unsure of how to proceed with the character. As many times as there's perfectly fine scenes with her, there's an equal number of ones where it felt like she slipped into inauthenticity. I simply didn't believe her performance. Taye Diggs was fine as Shakespeare. He has a few moments, but he comes across as someone who has relied more on his looks than his talents. I've seen him in multiple films later in his career and this isn't an issue, but this performance was a little rocky. Whoopi Goldberg provides some nice comedic relief, but she needed to show a little more restraint. I did love seeing James Pickens Jr. in a small role near the end. Really, the cast was a bit below average.

It was no surprise to me that director Kevin Rodney Sullivan was making his feature film debut here. He'd directed a bunch of television movies before this. That's exactly what this movie feels like- a glorified television movie. Sullivan simply did not have the talent to make this movie worthwhile. It felt like the film got away from him from the first scene and he was never able to fully execute on it.

How Stella Got Her Groove Back was occasionally painful for me to watch. It's a bad movie and worst of all, it's not a short bad movie. I never ever, ever want to see this again.

Rating 1-10
Tim's Rating- 5


If You Enjoyed This Movie, We Recommend: Guess Who