Parents' Guide to Bad Shabbos

Movies about people making bad decisions are always a challenge to watch and, without any mitigating cleverness of script or direction, Bad Shabbos is a perfect specimen of the genre. The story is based almost entirely on the faulty premise that the ingestion of too many laxatives in conjunction with an ensuing accidental fall add up to premeditated murder, and anyone in the vicinity of the incident would be sent to prison if the authorities were called. Once that absurdity is accepted, the manufactured problem of disposing of a dead body just when the new in-laws are coming becomes the focus. That leads to the movie's one original thought: Dad tries to get around the ban against carrying anything but babies and food on the Sabbath (a non-starter when you're a Jew trying to get rid of a body on a Friday night) by placing a challah on the corpse. Dead bodies have been far more hilariously dealt with in such comedies as Arsenic and Old Lace, Weekend at Bernie's, and S.O.B.

Worse yet, the Jewish family is predictably represented as argumentative and petty, and the Jewish mother (Kyra Sedgwick) is tagged as a typically passive-aggressive foe to the non-Jew her child plans to marry. Jokes are sarcastically made about Jews "controlling the media and the banks," an ironic assertion that may be lost on the literal-minded who actually believe it. When the Catholic in-laws-to-be come from the Midwest to share a New York City Sabbath dinner, they too are stereotypical in their subtle antisemitic bias and ignorance. The actors have no alternative but a lot of scenery-chewing shtick. A cut above is David Paymer as the fidgety dad, Milana Vayntrub as daughter Abby (also seen in AT&T commercials), and Method Man as the problem-solving doorman.