Movie Review: 'Mo' Money' (1992)

In Mo' Money, which he wrote and produced, Damon Wayans plays a petty urban crook who has grown sick of risking his butt for the sake of a $50 con job. Enticed by the luscious, upwardly mobile young woman (Stacey Dash) he sees entering a swank downtown office, he finagles himself a job in the mail room. The movie is fast and funny when it shows us an array of dysfunctional corporate types through the eyes of its incredulous hustler hero: We're seeing dorkishness at its most embarrassingly Caucasian. And Wayans, who on TV's In Living Color exaggerates — and revels in — the absurdity of black stereotypes with some of Eddie Murphy's old gusto, doesn't reserve his darts for whites. In Mo' Money, he lampoons the acquisitiveness of ghetto dreamers; he sees the comic underside of people who don't have anything but can still fantasize about having it all. After a while, though, the hero is lured into the clutches of a corrupt coworker (John Diehl), and the movie becomes a halfhearted ''thriller.'' It loses not merely its pulse but its comic attitude, its manic satirical vision of inner-city money fever.