Tiffany Haddish

  • Nobody’s Fool (2018)

    Nobody’s Fool (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) My ongoing effort to watch Tyler Perry’s filmography took a strange turn with Nobody’s Fool. Just as I was thinking I had a handle on Perry’s approach (a pedestrian, PG-rated paean to traditional values as filtered through the black American experience), here comes a film that opens with a lascivious midriff shot and features Tiffany Haddish loudly rutting in the back of a pickup to conclude the film’s opening moments. Yes — upon verification, Nobody’s Fool is Perry’s first R-rated feature, and one that is associated with a major studio (Paramount) and with better-known actors (notably Haddish, but also Whoopi Goldberg, and a showy one-scene wonder by Chris Rock). In other words — this isn’t your usual Perry film, and Haddish’s typically exuberant presence almost bends the gravity of the production toward her. As a result, Nobody’s Fool often feels unbalanced: While Tika Sumpter does her best to lead the cast as a no-nonsense urban professional, Haddish steals every scene and is more often than not where all of the film’s R-rating material comes from. If she feels like an intrusion in Perry’s usually more mannered world, that’s probably not by accident. (Once I know more about Perry’s filmography, I’ll be able to confirm a suspicion — that her role in this film is not dissimilar to the studious transgression that Perry allows himself when playing Madea.)  It’s all interesting, but not quite enough to make the film successful. While there are bits and pieces of good ideas here (most notably its blend of rehabilitation, romantic comedy, and catfishing-or-not mystery), they don’t quite gel together satisfyingly. There’s a notable amount of idiot plotting going on, contrived to maintain suspense for far too long, followed by an obvious narrative cheat in resolving a romantic triangle by showing how one partner is suddenly completely unsuitable in the bedroom. Almost as if the film had no interest whatsoever in honestly resolving its own tension. Considering that Nobody’s Fool doesn’t have much in terms of stylistic execution, another rewrite would have been really helpful.

  • The Kitchen (2019)

    The Kitchen (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2020) Performative female empowerment, 1970s cosplay and antiheroic rhetoric smash into each other in The Kitchen, a crime thriller taking us back to 1978 NYC’s Hell’s Kitchen neighbourhood to show how three mob wives turn to crime in order to make ends meet while their husbands are in prison. It’s no accident if the film happens to showcase three of the most notable actresses of the moments in a search for serious drama credentials: Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish and Elisabeth Moss, all thoroughly deglammed and relishing their tough-girl roles. Haddish arguably gets the most out of it: Moss’s dramatic credentials are solid and McCarthy’s been pretty good in off-persona dramatic roles, but Haddish’s career has been almost entirely comic to date, so there’s something new for her to do here. In bits and pieces, The Kitchen is fun: while the narrative is often ham-fisted in how to get from Point A to Point B, seeing our heroines discover some self-resourcefulness as underdogs is an engrossing crowd-pleasing arc. Writer-director Andrea Berloff has fun with her material, Margo Martindale has a good supporting turn and Trump gets a not-so-subtle slam in passing. Highlights include a romantic meet-cute in which a supporting hero (Domhnall Gleeson) meets one of the heroines by shooting her would-be rapist dead, then teaching her how to dismember the body and dump it in the river. (Dismemberment becomes such a recurring motif in this film that it becomes almost comic in its predictability—whelp, someone’s getting dismembered at the end of this scene!) Alas, this leads us to The Kitchen’s more vexing aspect, which is to say its problematic use of violence as empowerment. While the film does lead us closer to a realization that the real antagonists are male-dominated power structures, the underdog status of the heroines turns into hubris. With an ending that’s not as retributive as one could hope for, the film doesn’t even approach an argument that violence is not necessarily more acceptable when it’s perpetrated by women—hypocrisy becomes real in the film’s last-act ballet of revenge when the husbands are released from prison and the action goes all over the place. (Unlike other movies, The Kitchen is weakly-built enough that it does not earn its use of violence.) A few twists punctuate the end of the film, leaving an impression that there’s a better movie somewhere in The Kitchen that is not fully realized—and, in fact, may not be fully realizable at the moment where violence is portrayed as being good as long as it’s committed by the good people on the bad people.

  • Night School (2018)

    Night School (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2019) Star vehicles works best when you really, really like that star, and while I’m still relatively positive about Tiffany Haddish and Kevin Hart, I’m feeling that both of them, with their oversized comic personas, could be a bit over-exposed at the moment. (Hart more than Haddish given his longer time in the spotlight.)  This doesn’t help Night School, but to be honest there’s more than just that as an issue here. The film is lazy in the way most Hart vehicles have been so far, with him playing more or less the same character, and exhibiting the same tics. (Given that it’s partially based on exasperated annoyance, this is not conductive to a long-term career. We’ve seen what happened to Chris Tucker.)  The gags are obvious, predictable but more damningly far too long for their own good—many of them keep going well after the humour has been milked from it. Did no one re-read the script and suggest that some moments weren’t that funny? Oh wait—someone did, because Night School credits no less than six writers on this trifle of a movie. The stitches definitely show: The film errs between silly comedy and pseudo-heartfelt sentiment (and drags badly during those later sequences), and work best when it loosens up to feature the entire night school group rather than when it focuses on just Hart and Haddish. There are, to be fair, a few good moments. (Not all of them feature Megalyn Echikunwoke in lingerie.) But there are also a fair number of head-scratchers (even by dumb comedy standards), and unconvincing plot beats. The film’s worst trait is its predictability, largely based on the comic personas of the actors. The scenes can be seen coming well in advance, sapping much of the film’s energy. While Night School isn’t horrible, it’s also less than expected, and definitely less than it could have been. I can’t help but think that something got lost after the third or fourth writer.

  • Girls Trip (2017)

    Girls Trip (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (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.