Watch The Best Man Holiday Online Free (2013) or Download The Best Man Holiday Movie Now. Throughout the years, there have been marriages, children and divorces—not to mention all the love and heartbreak that accompany a life well lived—but the group has not been able to manage a proper get-together since Lance and Mia’s wedding. But that’s all about to be remedied. When the college friends finally reunite over the Christmas holidays, they will discover just how easy it is for long-forgotten rivalries and passionate romances to be reignited. Before I get to the present business, I want to say this: I hate Christmas. It's not just because I grew up in a Jewish home, where Christmas was perceived as just another anti-Semitic plot. It's because everything has to be so dumb at holiday time, especially in entertainment. Why does our local oldies radio station, for example, play nothing but Christmas music for, like, two months before the holiday? Don't they know how bad those songs are? Jingle bell rock, my ass. One reason for all the manufactured merriment is that Christmas, appropriated from the pagan Saturnalia, comes at the darkest time of the year. It's an ineffably glum time, frigid and bleak. All the more reason to stuff your face, guzzle eggnog and watch terrible, terrible Christmas movies.

Download The Best Man Holiday Movie Free (2013) or Watch The Best Man Holiday Online Now. For that reason, I give Malcolm D. Lee, writer and director of BEST MAN HOLIDAY, credit for portraying Christmas as it really is: the saddest time of the year. Lee, a cousin of Spike Lee, has a penchant for serious drama that informs his comedies (ROLL BOUNCE, WELCOME HOME, ROSCOE JENKINS). THE BEST MAN HOLIDAY, a very late sequel to Lee's 1999 debut THE BEST MAN, is ostensibly a comedy, but it's really a solemn drama with some comic scenes. The story has the original characters, a group of college friends, reuniting 15 years later for a holiday celebration at the home of Lance Sullivan (Morris Chestnut), a professional footballer and onetime best friend of Harper (Taye Diggs), the novelist who in the earlier film published a best-selling autobiographical roman a clef that scandalized his friends. More recently, Harper has had a hard time matching his early success. His publisher rejects his latest novel, suggesting that he instead write a biography of his gridiron hero friend Lance.

Watch The Best Man Holiday Online Free (2013) or Download The Best Man Holiday Movie Now. Harper's wife, Robin (Sanaa Lathan), is pregnant and money is scarce, so Harper ponders writing the Lance biography. After accepting a holiday invitation from Lance's wife, Mia (Monica Calhoun), Harper hesitates to ask Lance to cooperate on the bio, because the two friends clashed in the earlier movie when Harper's book revealed he had a tryst with Mia while she was dating Lance. In THE BEST MAN, Lance was a compulsive womanizer with a violent temper (just right for the NFL), but also a pious, Bible-quoting Christian. In the new movie, Lance is still spouting Scripture, but is now a devoted husband and father. Having been beat up by Lance in the earlier movie, Harper wisely tiptoes around him in this installment, subtly extracting information for use in the proposed book. The other friends in attendance are Jordan (Nia Long), Harper's careerist pal and sort-of love interest; Jordan's solicitous white boyfriend, Brian (Eddie Cibrian); shy teacher Julian (Harold Perrineau), now a private school headmaster; Julian's sweet, ex-stripper wife, Candace (Regina Hall); Julian's domineering ex-girlfriend Shelby (Melissa De Sousa), now a vain reality TV star; and the irrepressible "Q," or Quentin, (Terrence Howard), the movie's most amusing character, still foul-mouthed and funny.

Download The Best Man Holiday Movie Free (2013) or Watch The Best Man Holiday Online Now. The players are an attractive mix, though it must be said that Chestnutt and Diggs both looked better with hair. Their conversations are low-key and intelligent, and the movie is free of the broad hijinks found in most holiday-reunion movies. Lee has a good ear for dialogue: the men's conversations are funny and profane, and the women's discussions are cool and fairly smart. Old grudges, resentments, rivalries and attractions are reignited, and modern technology intervenes, with a revealing YouTube video that leads to a hastily smashed smartphone and a spirited catfight between two of the women, and an iPad that causes a fresh rift between Harper and Lance. Wounds are salved as the group unites around a major tragedy. Though the transition from comedy to sorrow is a bit jarring, the film navigates uncommon depths of grief and offers transcendence of a deeply religious kind. Lee's movies access faith in ways that are natural (or at least not as ham-fisted as with Tyler Perry.) Compared to the first movie, this one is a bit static, relying more on dialogue than action. It also leaves characters undeveloped and unexplained, relying too much on memories of the first movie, which is a decade and a half old. While production values are glossier and Lee's hand surer, one might prefer the casual, handmade quality of THE BEST MAN, as well as the presence of some amusing minor players.

Watch The Best Man Holiday Online Free (2013) or Download The Best Man Holiday Movie Now. The time spent with these characters, however, is not unpleasant. Compared to a juvenile, mostly Caucasian reunion comedy GROWN-UPS, the movie is a model of tasteful restraint. Lee's mix of comedy and pathos will not be to everyone's taste, especially in a ho-ho-holiday movie, but it's different enough from the usual Christmas fodder to earn an appreciative nod. Three out of 4 stars. "The Best Man Holiday" is an awkward title that hints that the movie's reasons for existing are purely commercial, or at least that a marketing department felt it would be risky otherwise. Not having seen "The Best Man", it could well be an obvious act of recycling and stretching to include characters that don't fit this story, but if so, then the original must have been pretty darn good, as "Holiday" feels like a welcome reunion even if this one's first time meeting these characters.

Download The Best Man Holiday Movie Free (2013) or Watch The Best Man Holiday Online Now. In the nearly fifteen years since the first movie, the best man in question, Harper Stewart (Taye Diggs) has written some books and joined the faculty at NYU, although both his writing and academic careers are hitting bumps at an inopportune time, as wife Robin (Sanaa Lathan) is in the final weeks of a difficult pregnancy. His agent suggests a biography of his best friend from college, retiring New York Giants running back Lance Sullivan (Morris Chestnut), and when Lance's wife Mia (Monica Calhoun) invites them to spend Christmas with their family, it's tempting. Also invited are Mia's bother Quentin (Terrence Howard), her best friend Jordan (Nia Long) and her boyfriend Brian (Eddie Cibrian), Lance's friend Julian (Harold Perrineau) and his wife Candace (Regina Hall), and Julian's ex-girlfriend Shelby (Melissa De Sousa).

Watch The Best Man Holiday Online Free (2013) or Download The Best Man Holiday Movie Now. Harper isn't the only one having money troubles; the charter school Julian and Candace operate has lost a major donor. Jordan's issues are more romantic; Brian is perfectly nice, even if her friends have a few laughs over just how white he is, but she's so focused! These stories are thin enough that characters actually call each other out on not just going about things directly, although writer/director Malcolm D. Lee and his cast are mostly able to make it feel like legitimate matters of pride, confusion, and embarrassment (and, occasionally, just looking for trouble) on the characters' parts rather than the clumsy way comedies often put obstacles in their characters' paths.

Download The Best Man Holiday Movie Free (2013) or Watch The Best Man Holiday Online Now. Of course, he can do that because there's something else that only comes out in bits and pieces, and the way Lee and company handle this more serious material is almost as well-done as the comedy. It's the sort of thing that can often feel like an abrupt, awkward shift in tone, but Lee shows an unusually sure hand in avoiding the usual pitfalls - even mostly-comic characters like Shelby and Quentin manage to do okay. Lee's more nuanced with religion than many filmmakers telling this story might be, respecting characters' faith while showing the trap it can be for those who pin worldly expectations to it. For all that the back end of the movie may occasionally trend toward clumsiness and melodrama, good sense tends to break out as well. Lee is smart enough to recognize that the audience doesn't really want to see this group fighting and adroitly keeps it to what the story needs.

Watch The Best Man Holiday Online Free (2013) or Download The Best Man Holiday Movie Now. After all, this reunion happens because the audience has some lingering fondness for the ensemble, and it's not too hard to see why. Taye Diggs is closer to the head of the cast than anyone else, and he really should be a bigger star - he's good-looking, charming, able to get laughs or pathos out of quick changes of facial expression without it seeming like mugging. Morris Chestnut's Lance is naturally going to look a little stiff next to Diggs's Stewart, but it's something that works for the character. Sanaa Lathan and Monica Calhoun are, fortunately, able to be more than the women who are more sensible than their immature men, especially Calhoun, who gets some of the movie's trickier moments. Nia Long is another standout, playing a woman who is both solid and funny and to whom the boyfriend is decidedly second-fiddle. Harold Perrineau, Regina Hall, Melissa De Sousa, and Terrence Howard fill out the cast and make characters who could very well seem extraneous funnier and more well-rounded than they might otherwise have been.

Download The Best Man Holiday Movie Free (2013) or Watch The Best Man Holiday Online Now. They're good-looking, likable folks in a movie that skews the same way. Lee and company do all right in balancing the one set of characters' financial issues with the other's rather opulent life without it feeling weird, although one might wonder what sort of nanny squad is looking after the eight pre-teens when they're not needed for a scene with the adults. There's also plenty of good-natured, funny raunch passing between the characters that doesn't get mean. The holiday setting gives the movie plenty of color and an upbeat soundtrack. And by the time it's over, a sequel which would call back to the original more directly may be in the offing, and that doesn't seem like a bad thing. It's a cast worth seeing more of, even if it does mean another awkward title.