The Best Man Holiday, review 15 cert, 123 min Dir: Malcolm D. Lee; starring: Taye Diggs, Sanaa Lathan, Nia Long, Terrence Howard, Regina Hall, Monica Calhoun, Morris Chestnut, Harold Perrineau, Melissa De Sousa The Best Man was a modestly popular 1999 comedy-drama with a completely African-American ensemble cast. Some of its stars (Terrence Howard, Nia Long, Taye Diggs) have been more steadily employed and visible since than others, but all are hereby reunited for a belated sequel from the same writer-director, Malcolm D. Lee. It's a Christmas get-together scenario with a debt to 1983"s The Big Chill, as this gang of old friends all descend on the whopping-great mansion owned by their most successful member, an American football star played by Morris Chestnut, and his wife Mia (Monica Calhoun). The tone oscillates between raunchy, vicious, and sentimental. There's tiresome stuff about which of the women are better at oral sex, and it reaches a nadir during the mid-film cat-fight between Regina Hall - best in show, despite her character's demeaning backstory - and De Sousa's scheming hussy of a reality-TV star. This is broad-brush stuff, with little original insight into how wealth has shaped this crew for good and bad. Howard's wacky costumes make him look like even more of a pimp than the one he played in Hustle & Flow, and Sanaa Lathan's character, despite the excuse of being pregnant, is so strenuously passive-aggressive she gets on your nerves. Somehow, though, this bumper seasonal angst-fest gradually gets its hooks in. The cancer bombshell about a major character is more sincerely dramatised than you're expecting, and Diggs and Chestnut create at least one persuasive relationship - they're close friends estranged by the meteoric rise of one and the career stagnation of the other. Like many awkward, clanger-filled real-life Christmas gatherings, it goes through some alarmingly rocky patches, but comes together in the end. GALLERY: 10 best sci-fi sports films