Double Take

Directed by George Gallo, Double Take follows successful businessman Daryl Chase (Orlando Jones) as he’s forced to go on the run after a series of misunderstandings leave him suspected of murder – with Daryl’s subsequent efforts at clearing his name both helped and hindered by a shifty street hustler (Eddie Griffin’s Freddy Tiffany). Filmmaker Gallo, working from his own script, delivers a periodically passable yet mostly tedious comedy that features, at its core, a seriously grating performance by Griffin, as the actor turns in persistently larger-than-life work that remains a palpable distraction for virtually all of the movie’s 88 minutes – with the arms-length atmosphere compounded, to an increasingly exhausting extent, by a thoroughly (and egregiously) convoluted narrative (ie it’s almost impossible to comfortably follow the plot, ultimately). And although the picture admittedly does contain a very small handful of entertaining sequences and episodes, including (and especially) a laugh-out-loud funny moment where Daryl, having disguised himself as Freddy, attempts to order malt liquor from a dining-car waiter, Double Take builds towards an entirely uninvolving third act that ensures it concludes on just about as lackluster and underwhelming a note as one could possibly have envisioned – with the final result a disappointing endeavor that could only have been improved with almost any other actor in the Griffin role.

** out of ****