Fall Girls (2019)

(On TV, June 2021) I have a soft spot for BET channel original films — they don’t always aim high, but the diversity of characters is often interesting by itself, and the actresses often look really nice. With Fall Girls, we have the feeling that the premise comes from the melted components of roughly a dozen films. The opening moments have four women (three of them friends, one of them definitely not) heading to Las Vegas to live it up with their soon-to-be-retiring boss. But after a night of (what else?) wild debauchery, they wake up in a trashed hotel room, with their boss dead. Fans of The Hangover and Girls Trip (to name only two) can rest easy, because now comes Weekend at Bernie’s to take over as guiding light, as the four lead characters fake their way into making everyone believe that their boss is still alive and hanging with them… even to those who killed her. After that, the plot goes off in all directions, what with the one-night stand that ends up being more than that, corporate rivalry gone hot, female bonding comedy, and a concluding thirty seconds crammed with more crosses, double-crosses and triple-crosses than an entire cathedral. There’s even some stylistic flair from time to time, at least more than is the norm for BET originals. Fall Girls stops making any sense well before the end, but the conclusion springs a patently impossible new technology as a way to explain an unexplainable plot — just to give you an idea about how little writer-director Chris Stokes actually cares about us caring. Still, it’s not without its moments. Amara La Negra looks good despite some shaky line readings, and there are a few chuckle-worthy moments. The ending is so over-the-top that it gathers some admiration for audacity, if not any compliments for plausibility. Fall Girls may not be great art, but it’s middling fun and that’s really what I was expecting.