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Verdict: A fun, challenging wedding flick with great music and a talented ensemble cast.

Details: Starring Taye Diggs, Nia Long and Morris Chestnut. Written and directed by Malcolm D. Lee. Rated R for profanity and sexuality. 1 hour, 58 minutes.

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: If "My Best Friend's Wedding" had been more than just a pleasant, easy-on-the-eyes movie, it would have been called "The Best Man."

Exit Julia Roberts. Enter Taye Diggs.

In Malcolm D. Lee's often funny, sexy and prickly comedy-drama, Diggs heads a talented ensemble cast in an outright contender for fall's best date movie: a glossy wedding film punctuated with soul-stirring music (Bob Marley, Stevie Wonder, Me'Shell Ndegeocello, Maxwell), flurries of flesh and real dramatic bite.

It's a plot that occasionally digs deep into the intricate nature of friendship, love and sex among a group of successful twentysomethings gathering for the union of two old college friends.

Many who've heard about "The Best Man" quickly dismiss it as a rip-off of "The Wood," last summer's remember-when, good-times movie that not only had a wedding at its core but also starred Diggs. But "Best Man" focuses far less on flashbacks and, more than once, provokes the same kind of dramatic shivers that made Lawrence Kasdan's reunion hit "The Big Chill" such a big thrill.

Diggs plays Harper Stewart, the film's title groomsman and an up-and-coming writer. His steamy new book, a coming-of-age tale about a collegian and his guy and gal pals, is about to get played large on "Oprah." Naturally, Harper's friends — nicely played by Morris Chestnut, Nia Long, Harold Perrineau, Monica Calhoun and, especially, Terrence Howard — are more than curious about how their lives are portrayed.

One key scene involves a poker game, in which the guys' requisite male bonding turns into a frank and challenging thesis on fidelity. It evokes the kind of raw, emotional power you just don't get in all-jokey relationship films like "The Story of Us."

And, ultimately, it makes "The Best Man" better than "My Best Friend's Wedding."

— Bob Longino, Cox News Service

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