Girls Trip (2017)

Directed by Malcolm D. Lee. Starring Regina Hall, Jada Pinkett, Queen Latifah, Tiffany Haddish, Kate Walsh, Mike Colter, Larenz Tate, Deborah Siriboe, Kofi Siriboe, Lara Grice. [R]

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: four old friends who’ve drifted apart in recent years reunite for a long weekend trip which gets out of control with the outrageousness and the “truth bomb” encounters; one’s a successful public figure who’s lost touch, one struggles with her own career and has beef with the first one, one’s an uptight single mom who needs to get her freak on, and one’s an unfiltered loudmouth and hedonist who can’t be contained. The ladies put up a good fight, but it’s a losing effort with story construction this formulaic and joke/scenario writing this lazy. Do you want absinthe-tripping nightclub brawls, noisy oral sex performed on fruit, and “projectile urination” over a crowd of people? Or do you want to see four confident but flawed black women bicker and bond over an eventful few days? You get both here; I just wish wit, inspiration and emotional validity weren’t so hard to come by. As the unchained party animal, Haddish generates the most chuckles, but she’s a lot to take at length, and is the only one of the four without much of a journey/arc—just a machine of intoxicated, libidinous anarchy. Running an even two hours, I really started feeling the length towards the end during a final act which felt compelled to spell everything out repeatedly. As it’s set during the Essence Music Festival in New Orleans, the movie features a few brief musical performances from the likes of New Edition, P. Diddy, et al.

42/100