Movie Review: Girls Trip

Girls Trip ** ½ / *****

Directed by: Malcolm D. Lee.

Written by: Kenya Barris & Tracy Oliver and Erica Rivinoja.

Starring: Regina Hall (Ryan Pierce), Queen Latifah (Sasha Franklin), Jada Pinkett Smith (Lisa Cooper), Tiffany Haddish (Dina), Larenz Tate (Julian Stevens), Mike Colter (Stewart Pierce), Kate Walsh (Elizabeth Davelli), Kofi Siriboe (Malik), Lara Grice (Bethany), Deborah Ayorinde (Simone).

 

I really wanted to like Girls Trip more than I did. The “surprise” hit comedy of the summer (which is only a surprise, because the people who do box office projections cannot, for some reason, accurately gage the interest of non-white audiences) is this women-behaving-badly comedy in the mold of Bridesmaids – and seen in other films recently, like the not very good Bad Moms and the downright awful Rough Night. What distinguishes Girls Night from those films is the fact that all the women this time are black – and they’re all in their 40s (or in the case of Tiffany Haddish, supposed to be). At its best, Girls Trip made me laugh quite a bit – but the film goes on for over two hours, and cannot sustain that kind of comedy for that long. The final half hour or so is a mess, as it tries to grow serious in a way that rings hollow. Of course, I’ll be the first to admit that a) I’m not the target audience for this film, b) that the target audience for this film – women, specifically black women, seem to love this film and c) that target audience is grossly, grossly underserved by Hollywood, so hey – what the hell do I know?

 

The film takes place over the course of a long weekend in New Orleans. It’s there where Ryan Pierce (Regina Hall – one of those great black actresses who never gets the roles equal to her talented) is going to be the keynote speaker at the Essence Festival. She has invited her best friends from college along for the ride. They are gossip blogger with a financial problem Sasha (Queen Latifah), divorced single mother Lisa (Jada Pinkett Smith) and firecracker Dina (Tiffany Haddish), the most loyal in the group, who is also the most likely to get them in trouble. In college they were known as the Flossy Posse, and they still say they are best friends - although they don’t see each other much anymore, and there are tensions amongst the group.

 

The film is really a series of setups in which these four talented women get themselves into a situation, and then do something painfully embarrassing to bring the scene to a close. The narrative thread that runs through the movie is about Ryan- who is set to become the next Oprah, alongside her husband Stewart (Mike Colter) – as the couple have sold themselves as “having it all” – and are going to get a lucrative talk show to sell that even more. But then Sasha gets a picture of Stewart that proves he’s cheating on Ryan – and given her dire financial situation, publishing it would help.

 

The chemistry between the four leads is the reason to see Girls Trip. Every one of them is funny – and if Haddish is funnier than the rest, that’s in part because her role lends itself to being that much funnier. The rest have some dramatic storylines, and real world stuff weighing them down – but Haddish can crank it up to 11 from the get go, and then just keeping getting louder. She is a star in the making.

 

The film was directed by Malcolm Lee, who does a decent job with the screenplay by Kenya Barris and Tracy Oliver. Somewhere along the way, the movie needed to be trimmed down a little bit – few and far between are the comedies that can keep things moving like this for over two hours, and this isn’t one of them. The film though clearly served its audience precisely what they wanted. I wish the film was better – better paced, with a less false ending – but I cannot deny it delivered what it promised.