Starring Martin Lawrence, Cedric the Entertainer, and James Earl Jones. Rated 14A.

Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins, a comedy of ill manners, is the story of a man facing a family reunion, a return to home soil that promises an experience like adding Mentos to Diet Coke.

Often cast as a manic wildman, Martin Lawrence is here understated and watchful, fully believable as Roscoe Jenkins, a flashy, successful talk-show therapist (with a celebrity girlfriend) whose self-absorption is revealed to be a protective response to childhood bullying.

Once back in Alabama to attend his parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, Roscoe is revealed as the smallest and least defended of his relatives. Mother (Margaret Avery) is ethereal and adored; father (James Earl Jones) is solemn and piercingly judgemental; his natural brother (Michael Clarke Duncan) is a police officer with arms the size of beer kegs; his adoptive brother (Cedric the Entertainer) is a charming, ruthless opportunist; and his sister (Mo’Nique) is loud, proud, and unpredictably violent. Only cousin Reggie (Mike Epps) approaches Roscoe’s invisibility, insulated by inebriation and absurdist humour.

Over the course of a weeklong vacation, Roscoe confronts the truth of his unhappiness and subsequent reinvention as a Hollywood phony. Possibly because there’s such a thing as keeping it too real, or maybe because he hasn’t read much Alice Miller, director and writer Malcolm D. Lee plays father’s beatings and mother’s indifference largely for laughs.

It would have been nice if Lee could write for women; Roscoe’s fiancée (Joy Bryant) is such a one-note harpy that there is neither surprise nor pleasure in his discovery that he still loves his high-school crush (Nicole Ari Parker). But it may be enough that Lee shows us why people say “you can’t go home again”: you didn’t like it the first time.