Cross-dressing has always been a quick and easy device in comedy. I mean, geez, there was Bosom Buddies way back when, I remember only watching reruns of it. And then there was Mrs. Doubtfire. And the film to which the sequel, Big Momma’s House 2, stemmed from. Apparently, the producers thought that Martin Lawrence dressing up as a large black woman was a funny enough idea that not only would it sustain one movie, but it could also roll the laughs out in a sequel.

If seeing Lawrence dressed as Big Momma and falling around is your idea of comedy, then, hey, this is that riot you were looking for. Martin Lawrence has always been a funny guy; from his stand-up days all the way to his movies, Lawrence has had a good knack for provoking laughs. And he does succeed in Big Momma’s House 2, but you get the feeling that he’s trying, he’s trying really hard to make it funny.

He does have to try hard, because if not for his antics, it simply wouldn’t have been funny. Jokes that don’t have him in the scene don’t work. And the jokes with him in the scene don’t exactly work, either.

It’s easy to identify why. There just wasn’t that much effort put into the writing. It’s all too easy, like they got a grab bag of action-comedy-family-movie clichés and threw them all in. There’s the dead partner which kicks the story off. But then it doesn’t really matter much. There’s the suspicious wife, who doesn’t know her husband is working undercover. There are the cute kids, each one with an issue that our cross-dressing protagonist will help to solve.

Big Momma’s House 2 is basically an example of why we should distrust sequels. They had a hit with the first movie, and riding that they decided to make another. Not much effort in thinking of a good story, just make another movie without thinking too much about it. What we get is tired and lame. It’s a lot of jokes we’ve seen before, and the few that we haven’t, we feel like we have because most of the gags and punch lines seem telegraphed.

In TV shows, they have canned laughter to let you know when something’s funny, just in case you missed it. Big Momma’s House 2 could have done with canned laughter. In the theater when I watched, there were a lot of people laughing, to the movie’s credit. But with a story that’s been redone to death and jokes that are plain soggy with overuse, the movie has little more to offer than cheap chuckles.