電影《閨蜜假期》影評：[Film Review] Girls Trip (2017) 5.6/10

A sisterhood-proselytizing Hollywood comedy pitches to the African-American demography, routinely salted with no-holds-barred vulgarity, yes, still a viable blueprint to garner huge receipts in the North American market.

Regina Hall plays Ryan Pierce, asuccessful author of the chicken-soup-for-the-soul ilk, convenes her three lifelong friends for a weekend junket trip in New Orleans as she is selected as a keynote speaker in the Essence Music Festival. Besides Ryan, the soi-disant 「Flossy Posse」 is also made up with Sasha (Latifah), a gossip column writer whose business is on the rocks, Lisa ( Pinkett-Smith), a divorcée with two young kids and Dina (Haddish), a fiery clerk currently unemployed.

Their booze-bingeing, party-crashing, celebrity-hobnobbingtrip is punctuated by Ryan’s perfectly fronted marriage with Stewart Pierce (Colter) starting crumbling due to the latter’s cheating habit, and an old score between Ryan and Sasha to further compound the situation, which all paves the ways for Ryan to predictably tip the scale from forbearance to emancipation in her keynote speech and give a cleansing satisfaction to the core audience who are into her heart-lifting peroration, aka, those who actually buy her books. Thankfully owing to a persuasive Regina Hall, who is amazingly, able to add leverage to even the most banal lines, the finale doesn’t pan out as a schmaltzy disaster.

Intrigued purely by the hype of Tiffany Haddish’s Oscar campaign to put this flick on the watchlist, this reviewer tends to disagree with the ballyhoo, she is not even the best amongst her co-stars, for my money, it is Queen Latifah’s Sasha who gears herself up in the same calibre of Hall to the game, whereasJada Pinkett Smith feels a tad stiff in her prim-to-flirty retrogression and it is a crying patronizing move to pair her with Kofi Siriboe’s smoking-hot stud, usually it is an older man bestowed with a half-his-age hottie, so what director Malcolm D. Lee aims atis a petty vengeance by reversing their sex other than some more sober and progressive corrective. As forDina, apart from permanently ruining grapefruit for us (or otherwise giving an upswing of its sale, who knows?),「an empty vessel makes the most noise」 sounds germane to her larger-than-life comic relief endeavor.

To this day and age, it is starkly demoralizing to see a mainstream comedy still cannot exempt audience from lavatory humor, the golden shower gag is an embarrassing buzzkill in an otherwise glitzy, garden-variety, female-empowering boilerplate.

referential points: Paul Feig's BRIDESMAIDS (2011, 6.9/10), Todd Pillips’THE HANGOVER (2009, 6.8/10).