AllMovie

Me and Mrs. Jones is a feeble and overly broad romantic comedy. The film is presumably named for the Billy Paul song, but that classic soul song -- about a man in love with a married woman -- had an impassioned longing and a moral conflict at its core, engaging the listener in a way that Ed La Borde's silly smutty workplace comedy can't approach. While Brian J. White and Kim Fields have a certain charm as romantic leads Tracy and Desiree, they're surrounded by a motley crew of supporting characters, including a would-be comic white co-worker of Tracy's whose buffoonish appropriation of street slang and gestures is literally painful to watch. Also, in the film, Mrs. Jones (Wanda Christine) doesn't appear to be married. A husband (or ex-husband) is never seen or mentioned. She appears to have been named Mrs. Jones because that was the title of Paul's hit song. While Laborde and screenwriter Allen White make a halfhearted effort to humanize Mrs. Jones, she's a shrill witch, a classic sexist stereotype of a powerful woman. And although Tracy enters into a relationship with her of his own free will and then cheats on her with Desiree, for some reason the filmmakers apparently sympathize wholly with him. It's a credit to White's good-natured appeal as an actor that Tracy isn't completely repugnant. Clearly, Me and Mrs. Jones is meant to be an adult alternative to Hollywood's typical representation of the black experience in gang dramas and puerile sex comedies, along the lines of Soul Food or How Stella Got Her Groove Back, but it fails because its own unfortunate cartoonishness renders its relationship to any human experience tenuous.