Movie Review: “Girls Trip” Is Good, Unclean Fun

A foursome of old friends set it off in the very broad, very fun Girls Trip.

If the female ensemble films of 2017 have taught us anything, it’s that your ladies will always be there for you, whether it’s to help you raise a teenager, get rid of a body or perform amateur surgery.

And sure, they’ll even treat you to a wild night out.

Girls Trip, from director Malcolm D. Lee, doesn’t tread into the realm of body horror like The Beguiled or Rough Night (or hormonal horror, like 20th Century Women), but it allows four charismatic and well-matched leading ladies to give audiences an evening of good, unclean fun.

And if it’s not the intersectional feminist masterpiece some may have hoped for, this rare Hollywood comedy to feature four black women in their late 30s and mid-40s is still significant.

Regina Hall stars as Ryan, an inspirational Oprah-in-the-making whose supposedly dream marriage to ex-baller Stewart (Mike Colter) is about to net her a million-dollar brand endorsement. To seal the deal, she just has to get through a weekend in New Orleans—where she’ll be the keynote speaker at the Essence Festival—without the paparazzi snaps of Stewart and his Instagram-mistress going public.

She decides to use the three-day holiday in Louisiana to reconnect with her college pals, including down-on-her-luck journalist Sasha (Queen Latifah), buttoned-down divorcee Lisa (Jada Pinkett Smith) and Tasmanian Devil-level dynamo Dina (Tiffany Haddish). The girls, learning early of Stewart’s infidelity, drown their sorrows and try to recapture the glory days of their youth. Not everyone has the same constitution, though; like Lisa, who accidentally empties her bladder on unsuspecting passers-by from a Bourbon Street flying fox. Dina then does the same, except that time, it’s for funsies.

Girls Trip

The good news is Girls Trip provides 80 minutes of hilarity. The bad news is it comes in a 122-minute package. By the third act, ‘sleepover fatigue’ sets in, which is on brand for co-writer Kenya Barris, whose usually wonderful TV show Black-ish regularly suffers from overly-predictable story templates and solemn monologues.

Barris and his co-writer, Tracy Oliver, also penned last year’s deceptively poignant and political Barbershop: The Next Cut for Lee. That flick was significantly better than Girls Trip. However, it didn’t have the unstoppable comedic force of Tiffany Haddish (formerly of The Carmichael Show and Keanu), who is relentless, and who will likely enjoy a similarly relentless stream of offers after her breakout performance here as well.

That’s not to diminish her co-stars, including the always-steadying Latifah, and the often-underutilised Hall and Pinkett-Smith (the latter of whom, robbed of an Oscar for Magic Mike XXL, reminds us she’s an equal to her husband when it comes to all-out charm offensives).

Despite an expectedly earnest and cloying ending, the very, very broad revelry that comes before makes this trip worthwhile. In particular, watching Haddish do her thing—at her cast-mates; on the extras; to a fruit basket, in the movie’s most viscerally shocking and hilarious moment—provides one of the year’s biggest, rudest pleasures. And Girls Trip is the only place you can get it.

3/5

In cinemas August 31. Rated MA15+ for strong crude sexual humour and coarse language.