MOVIE REVIEW: ‘Girls Trip’ cheesy and clichéd

Will Smith and his wife Jada Pinkett attending a past event. Jada Pinkett-Smith is one of the stars of Girls Trip. PHOTO| FILE| NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • One of my main problems with the movie – spoiler alert – is that Tiffany Haddish’s character doesn’t actually have a real storyline.
  • She’s just along to be the funny sidekick to Regina Hall’s Queen Bee and Jada Pinkett-Smith’s Mama Bear. And Queen Latifah? I didn’t buy her bit either.

Here’s an unpopular opinion.

I liked Girls Trip. Why? Tiffany Haddish is hilarious and I don’t know why I haven’t heard about her before. What have I been doing? Who have I been listening to?

Anyway.

It’s making large numbers at the Box Office and servicing a generally ignored crowd – women who are single, like to party, and are black. There aren’t that many good stories out there for this demographic. Girls Trip is doing to girls’ night cinema what Tyler Perry did to black cinema with the iconic (yeah, I said it) Diary of a Mad Black Woman.

IS IT A GOOD MOVIE?

But is it a good movie?

Well. It’ll make you want to go to the Essence Festival – or at least, New Orleans, for sure. It’s never not cool to see all your celebrities showing out on a stage surrounded by black love and black girl magic. It’s a hard scenario to beat. The Essence Festival is where the story unfolds – and even though we only see snippets, it’s hella lit. So it’s good for New Orleans and Essence.

And it’s good for Tiffany Haddish. We see her as we never have before (because most of us haven’t seen her before) but as she so aptly should be – as the hilarious, turnt (note – with a t) incredibly bold female she only scratches the surface of in her interviews. So it’s good for her.

BAD FOR HER

But it’s also bad for her. One of my main problems with the movie – spoiler alert – is that Tiffany Haddish’s character doesn’t actually have a real storyline. She’s just along to be the funny sidekick to Regina Hall’s Queen Bee and Jada Pinkett-Smith’s Mama Bear. And Queen Latifah? I didn’t buy her bit either. The whole thing was choreographed around a rather corny (I say corny, but it happens to so many women that it is just the usual, now) stereotype of a woman frightened of being alone and therefore enduring a terrible marriage, while hiding it from her friends who are also hiding their own secrets from her. Ok, one of her friends is hiding things from her.

I don’t know about this movie, guys. I laughed out loud several times. But. I really do think the cheesy cliched script and the equally cheesy conclusion failed, because much as we would like to believe it, jokes galore do not a fempower movie make. What did you guys think?