Kingdom Come

Based on the play +Dearly Departed by David Dean Bottrell and Jessie Jones (who also penned this screenplay), this new comedy from the director of Jason’s Lyric looks at a family gathering after one of their clan dies of a stroke. In the midst of a sweltering summer, the Slocumb family convenes. They include Charisse (Jada Pinkett Smith), the long-suffering, frustrated wife of philandering Junior (Anthony Anderson); there’s also the Bible-spouting Marguerite (Loretta Devine), who prays to save her hard-living son Royce (Darius McCrary) from a life on welfare. Lucille (Vivica A. Fox) is the devoted family peacekeeper who is struggling with a money-grubbing funeral director, and her husband Ray Bud (L.L. Cool J) has major contempt for his family and wishes he were burying them instead. Kingdom Come also features Cedric the Entertainer as an intestinally challenged reverend and Whoopi Goldberg as the family matriarch., Bud Slocumb was “mean as a snake, and surly,” according to his widow Raynelle, who gathers the whole family for a big reunion. Warm comedy, with relatives who steal, sleep, swear and fart., This familial comedy centers around the matriarch of an extended, dysfunctional family who reunite after the death of her husband, though it’s apparent by everyone’s reactions that the old man couldn’t have died soon enough.