I’m starting to feel bad for Tiffany Haddish. Oh sure, 2019
proved to be a quite fruitful year for her on the voice-acting front, between
The Lego Movie 2 and The Angry Birds Movie 2, but on the live-action front, the
side of her that got pushed into the mainstream with Girls Trip? Not so much.
Night School was ghastly, her teaming-up with Tyler freaking Perry on Nobody’s
Fool couldn’t have possibly sounded like a good idea, and while she managed to
pull through okay with The Kitchen, that was largely in spite of everything
around her, not because of it. Her current presence as a comedic actress seems
to be codified by her being a potential saving throw for a film that needs
outside assistance, rather than actually giving her material to work with. And
with her latest, it seems like we’ve reached the bottom of the barrel.
Between her and Rose Byrne in the lead roles, there’s more
than enough chemistry to go around, and they’re backed by some solid supporting
talent in Jennifer Coolidge, Billy Porter and Salma Hayek in the villain role.
Shame that they aren’t given anything to do. Like, more so than a lot of other
comedies that descriptor applies to, as it seriously feels like writers Sam
Pitman and Adam Cole-Kelly are straining to come up with sufficient shit for
these actors to do. The film barely scrapes by at 80-minutes-and-change, and
when part of that includes mentioning that Hayek’s Claire Luna had been sent
drones as a ‘secret admirer’ gift from Jack Dorsey of Twitter (a moment that
goes absolutely nowhere), the whole affair is positively malnourished and kind
of desperate.
The closest this film gets to anything resembling actual
character is with Claire Luna, and that’s only because she’s been given literal
cartoon antics as her personality. With a tacky red wig that looks less like
Jessica Rabbit and more Lena Hyena, not to mention a certain purple dress that
looks like it was pulled out of Daphne’s wardrobe, she keeps puncturing holes in the film’s
attempts at promoting solidarity between women. She’s the bad guy trying to
drive our leads apart, and
the film makes it a point of showing her as a performative feminist, only
giving the façade of championing women just for the sake of a buck.
Which is the closest this ever gets to actually being funny,
because holy shit, there is some serious cheek behind that assessment. Aside
from how that specific aspect of her character is just another example of the
film struggling to fill in its minor running time, the way that the arguments
between Haddish’s Mia and Byrne’s Mel turn out… is it supposed to be this
catty? I don’t normally get into this kind of finger-pointing (or, at least, I try
not to), but knowing that the director, writers, cinematographer and editor are
all guys, these scenes feel like there’s a bunch of guys standing just out of
frame, waiting for a catfight to break out.
It doesn’t help that the film’s genuine attempts at feminist
empowerment are quite embarrassing in how surface level and been-there-done-that
it all turns out. It’s really bad when the closest to a decent idea it has
involves two straight men who want to ‘dispel certain stereotypes’ about people
who work in the beauty industry. And even then, the depictions of men (and more
importantly, the treatment of men by women) reek of arthritic stereotyping and
a lot of ‘what’s good for the goose’ hypocrisy. It’s feminist in the same way
that the Spice Girls were feminist, except this doesn’t even have the
personality to be distinctive against anything else it stands next to.
Actually, if this resembles anything in the pop music realm,
it’s BO$$ by Fifth Harmony, and not just because of the shared title. It’s loud
without saying anything of note, it’s obnoxious without any real sense of fun,
and it name-drops Michelle Obama for no reason other than name-brand
recognition. And my reaction to it is about the same as Camille Cabello’s when
it gets to the “I want a Kanye-ye, not a Ray J” part in the music video:
Discomfort and an urge to quickly brush off the whole thing. Can’t say I was
expecting much from the director of Alexander And The tl;dr, but man, I don’t
think I’ve ever missed Malcolm D. Lee and Paul Feig more than I do right now
after sitting through this utter waste of time and talent.
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