Review - Girls Trip (15)

Today is the last day that we will ever be this young.

Girls Trip does what it suggests on the poster (see directly above). The degree you enjoy it will, I'm guessing, be directly proportional to how much you want to cut loose with four BBFs on a alcohol and estrogen-fuelled festival weekend. I didn't want to, particularly, but tried to be open to the experience. Well you've got to keep an open mind, right?

The trip of the title involves four professional women, headed up by self-help writer Ryan (Regina Pierce), who travel to New Orleans for the annual Essence festival. It's a celebration of African-American music and culture inspired by the magazine of that title, and it provides a backdrop for Hangover-style antics, with the girls possibly surpassing the boys' bad behaviour in that movie. Ryan and gorgeous husband are on the verge of a TV contract with a live launch event at the festival, so it seems the perfect opportunity for her to reconnect with her college friends - collectively known as 'The Flossy Posse', in a protracted weekend of shameless shenanigans. 

Accompanying her are internet gossip queen Sasha (Queen Latifah), party-girl turned control-freak-mom Lisa (Jada Pinkett-Smith) and sex-obsessive-with-no-filter Dina (Tiffany Haddish). Of course the smiles and bravado of the girls belie tensions and personal crises, all of which surface during the trip to explosive effect, both dramatic and comic. And at one point the explosion is bodily and literal, in a scene surely inspired by Bridesmaids. Ryan's life it turns out (like we hadn't already guessed), is rather less perfect than it appears, and it will take her girlfriends to help her deal with the fallout.

Okay, stuff I liked in Girls Trip ... New Orleans, for starters. The film makes wonderful use of the city and the festival, capturing the vibrancy of both, and genuinely making me want to visit there. In addition to this the rapport between the four women is completely authentic, capturing the vibe of long-time friends reunited and cutting loose from work and responsibility. Pinkett-Smith is particularly endearing, as the staid suburban mother reconnecting with her younger fun self. Meanwhile Haddish is a kind of party rocket-fuel, with her lewd monologue-ing and - ehh - fruit-based demonstrations. Her motor-mouth shtick is almost too much at times.

Stuff I didn't... The story veers jarringly between soapy drama full of rather trite lessons-in-life and broad sex-comedy. The former aspect is heightened by an original score that's so syrupy it set my teeth on edge. Meanwhile much of the raunchy humour is primarily geared to be outrageous - not unlike Sasha Baron Cohen's most recent effort Grimsby - with the result that it misses the actual funny-mark. Crude can be funny, but they're not automatically the same thing! (I should add that nothing is so subjective as humour, and much of the rest of the cinema audience, my film-going companion included, clearly disagreed with me on this point. I'm truly glad they had more fun than I did.) 

Basically the entire experience struck me like an extended episode of Loose Women, if the producer had been shut out of the studio and all the panelists had attempted to sort each other's lives out, while getting speedily wrecked on tequila. I mean that less as a criticism and more as a genuine attempt to capture the spirit of the film, because trust me that is what you get.

In the end films about friendship, and how it stabilizes life in a way that relationships often fail to, are to be welcomed, whether the protagonists are male or female. It's also great to see these four actresses power the film along, with such euphoria. And if it didn't make me laugh nearly as much as the earlier-mentioned Bridesmaids did, that's probably just a matter of personal taste. 

But seriously, tone down the shmaltz. Please! Maybe I'm not within the film's demographic - but even so, there's never ever an excuse for that.

Ed's Verdict: Enjoyed the energy and embraced the overall sentiment, but seriously - don't make me watch it again.