Stars: Regina Hall, Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett Smith, Tiffany Haddish, Larenz Tate, Mike Colter, Kate Walsh
Director: Malcolm D. Lee
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars
The movies are occasionally just supposed to serve as escapist fare. Not as high-art, not as a mind exercise, not even as something spectacular to look at, but instead as escapist fare. I was reminded of that while watching Girls Trip over my Christmas vacation. The movie, a huge hit this past summer, is exactly the sort of film that becomes a late-breaking sleeper hit, centered around four friends reuniting after not hanging out for years, and of course in the process finding that their bond as pals is stronger than the messes their lives are currently in right now.(Spoilers Ahead) The movie centers around four friends: Ryan (Hall), a wildly successful self-help guru, Sasha (Latifah), an unsuccessful gossip columnist, Lisa (Pinkett Smith), a Type A nurse who recently went through a divorce, and Dina (Haddish), the party girl frequently between jobs. Ryan wants to get together the "Flossy Posse" as they were called in college, during the Essence Music Festival in hopes of recapturing some of her lost zest for life. While her marriage appears perfect from the outside, her husband is a philanderer and it's clear she's not living up to the ideals that she espouses as a self-help role model. All-the-while, a national chain called Bestsmart (yes, that's what they call it...this is not a film that trades in the subtle), is offering Ryan and her husband Stewart (Colter) an enormous offer to be their spokespeople, which could set them up financially for life.
Based on that paragraph, you can probably figure out exactly how this film unfolds, and you'd be right. Perhaps the biggest issue with Girls Trip, and where it fails in the wake of Bridesmaids (which it is frequently compared toward, but the latter is the considerably better film) is that this movie is almost comically predictable. Every character feels wrapped in a cliche, and every scene feels like a movie I could already quote before I went into the movie. With one exception (we'll get to in a second), the movie itself is drowned out by a script that is either focused on delivering heavy-handed messages (like love yourself or friendship is more important than anything else) or on giving us a series of bathroom humor jokes (literally two of the four actresses have to urinate on a crowd of people at one point during the picture). Regina Hall is a good actress, but the final speech she has to deliver when she realizes she doesn't have to stand up for her husband to prove she's a success, is the kind of thing that might work in real life where a celebrity going off script is rare, but in a movie it's something we've seen 10,000 times, and there's nothing new here to recommend the movie. I'll be honest-I didn't get what the fuss was about for this movie, as it feels pretty tired.
That being said, the actresses at the core are believable as friends, and it's clear that Tiffany Haddish has delivered a star-making role in the vein of McCarthy in Bridesmaids or Rebel Wilson in Pitch Perfect (again, though, McCarthy is the best of these three by a pretty wide margin, as her character has tones that the other two keep surface-level). Haddish is pretty much the sole attraction here, and steals every scene she's in as party-girl Dina. It takes a game performer to be able to successfully make love to a grapefruit (no, that's not a typo), and still come out as someone we're rooting for, and Haddish lands nearly all of Dina's increasingly lascivious lines with great aplomb. I don't know if it's what you'd call great acting (the Oscar push could happen, as I said on Saturday, but I feel like we should have a bit more of a critical eye before we proclaim this one of the year's five best), but it's eminently watchable. If the best thing that happens out of this movie is she gets a career, it'll be worth it as she's more than earned that chance. Otherwise, though, this has a few laughs but is kind of boring when Haddish isn't the center-of-attention.
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