Jada Pinkett-Smith is a gifted comedic and dramatic actress: Even when acting in such tripe as Jason's Lyric and A Low Down Dirty Shame, she has always brought her characters a level of honesty and integrity, no matter how poorly they're written. Which makes it even more unfortunate that Pinkett-Smith, in her first big starring vehicle, gives an awful performance in Woo, a film that could pass for an unusually long episode of The Wayans Brothers. She stars as a single, superstitious woman who is set up on a blind date with an uptight, upwardly mobile young paralegal (scrawny, rubber-limbed Tommy Davidson, the hip-hop Don Knotts of the '90s). Things go wrong from the start, however, as Pinkett-Smith leads Davidson on a wild night of depravity that borrows heavily from both Davidson's Booty Call and Martin Scorsese's After Hours. Like many entries in the current cycle of Buppie comedies (Sprung, Booty Call, et al), Woo attempts to deflect criticism by first establishing that its characters are successful, bourgeois, dynamic social climbers before requiring them to behave like mildly retarded, sex-crazed teenagers. But the central problem of Woo is not so much that it is crudely written, lowbrow trash—which it is—but that Pinkett-Smith's character, the focus of the film, is poorly developed and staggeringly unlikable. Shrill, abrasive, overbearing, and afflicted with a strange form of mental illness that varies according to the demands of the plot, it's difficult to see why the filmmakers would choose to build a film around her.