The Umbrella Men

“The showcase of Cape Town’s multiculturalism is where The Umbrella Men shines.”

Title: The Umbrella Men (2022)
Director: John Barker 👨🏼🇿🇦
Writer: John Barker 👨🏼🇿🇦

Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸

Technical: 2/5

Billed as a comedy and “caper heist” set during the Cape Town Minstrel Carnival, you’d expect The Umbrella Men to be brassy and jovial. Director John Barker certainly grasps for hijinks, using flirty dates and eleventh hour switcheroos as plot points, but efforts deflate due to paper-thin characters and soggy pacing. The main lead of Jerome Adams (Jaques De Silva) remains inscrutable beyond his function as the prodigal son who returns from Johannesburg to Cape Town upon his father’s passing. In a familiar turn, he finds himself the new owner of the family’s beloved but debt-riddled music club and must find a way to keep it afloat, if only to preserve a local institution. It’s unfortunate the film struggles so mightily to articulate its anti-gentrification stance; with an overstuffed cast of protagonists we never get to know, and cartoon villains too rote to feel menacing, its feel-good premise gets entirely lost.

Gender: 2.5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES, but barely

The Umbrella Men leaves just enough room for a few tropey female characters to squeeze past. Aunty Valerie (June van Merch) watches over the local community as a tough but warm matriarch. Keisha (Shamilla Miller), Jerome’s love interest, quickly becomes his ride-or-die though the script forgets to establish why she’d bother, given the trifling way he treats her. Lastly, we have Mila (Bronté Snell) who suffers the cumbersome role as token girl among the film’s protagonists who double as musicians named "The Umbrella Men"—emphasis on the word “men.”

Race: 5/5

The showcase of Cape Town’s multiculturalism is where Barker’s film shines. Location shooting captures the vibrancy of the Bo-Kaap’s brightly painted buildings, sun-worn textures, and cobblestone hills. Cape Town actors like Keisha’s Miller or Keenan Arrison, who plays Jerome’s best friend Mortimer, immerse the viewer through spoken Afrikaaps—a dialect that blends English and Afrikaans. And with a cast of almost all actors of color, the onscreen representation gets a big green checkmark.

It’s clear that Barker wanted to celebrate the resilience of the Cape Malay community by centering its people and sprinkling their history of oppression throughout the film. When it’s done organically, such as a passing reference to apartheid, the world-building succeeds. Less successful are the heavy-handed explanations, like an animated segment voiced over by Aunty Valerie that details the film’s central feud between two families, plus a breakdown of the tragic displacement of District 6 residents in the 1970s. The compulsion to pay homage to Cape Town’s past is understandable, but some implementations feel forced.

Bonus for Religion: +0.25

The film features Cape Malay characters, a Muslim ethnic group descended from enslaved and free Muslims from around the world. Islam doesn’t come up much, but Arabic can occasionally be heard. As Yaseen Kader describes his upbringing, “Interjections of Afrikaans, Arabic, and Malay were often woven in so smoothly that it was difficult to tell them apart. It’s just how Cape Town Muslims talk.”

Deduction for Body Diversity: -0.25

Two antagonists are characterized by their weight. Aunty Valerie introduces the father of the main villain as “the fat one” during her animated montage, while Keisha’s slimy boss, Mr. El Fontein (Daniel Barnett), is more heavy-set than any of The Umbrella Men.

Deduction for LGBTQ: -0.25

Though told by an antagonist and therefore not condoned, a couple tasteless jokes about gay rape are used to rile up Mortimer who had just left prison. Separately, when Mortimer is forced to masquerade as a woman in order to evade the authorities, his wearing of makeup and a skirt are meant to be funny. But the visual gag feels pulled from another era; who cares if a guy wears lipstick and a skirt for a disguise?

Mediaversity Grade: C 3.08/5

The Umbrella Men does a solid job of presenting Cape Malay culture with a genre twist. However, Barker stacks the cast with flat characters and uses outdated schtick to craft jokes that don’t always land. And no amount of good intentions can make up for what amounts to a plodding watch.

Like The Umbrella Men? Try these other heist movies.

Grade: CLiSeptember 10, 2022