Girls Trip (2017)

(On Cable TV, April 2018) The R-rated women-behaving-badly subgenre is now well defined: It may have started its latest streak with Bridesmaids, but there’s been one or two of them per year since then (Bachelorette, Bad Moms, Rough Night, etc.) and the sub-genre is becoming less and less remarkable with every new example. And yet, properly handled, they can allow female comedians to show what they can do once they’re unleashed. So it is that the single best reason to watch Girls Trip is Tiffany Haddish, taking a big character and making her feel even bigger. (Documentary accounts of Haddish’s personality suggest that she was a perfect fit for the role.)  Compared to her, even seasoned performers such as Regina Hall, Queen Latifah and Jada Pinkett Smith feel ordinary. Still, Girls Trip is decently entertaining—while it’s easy to quibble about its most outrageous moments, its wall-to-wall bad language, its occasionally repellent attitude, it does feel free to try anything and everything, getting a few chuckles along the way. It’s also difficult to appreciate, from my privileged white-guy perspective, how vital such a film must feel to a particular audience. It’s interesting to note a few moments here that would not attempted had the movie featured a cast of a different ethnicity—I’m specifically thinking about a prayer scene that feels organic even to the outrageous characters. So carry on, Girls Trip, for bringing something less frequently seen to the big screen, becoming a surprise box office hit and making Haddish an Oscar-presenting comedy superstar along the way. When everybody gets their own big-screen wish-fulfillment comedy, everybody wins.