Welcome to another installment of the TRASH BIN, where we watch the worst movies Hollywood has to offer, according to the critics, and give you our thoughts, good or bad. This week, Robert reviews the 2004 comedy, WHITE CHICKS.
Here is something I never thought I would say: White Chicks was not as bad as I thought it would be. I have extremely low expectations when it comes to movies starring Shawn and Marlon Wayans. Maybe it's their one-speed, all-out all the time approach to comedy, maybe it's their over-reliance on stereotypes for laughs, but they're just not funny to me. So I expected White Chicks to be an excrutiating waste of time. Imagine my surprise to find it wasn't excrutiating after all.
It was a close thing, though. Shawn and Marlon had overstayed their welcome with me within seconds of appearing on the screen. The two play FBI agents, and the film opens with them posing as Hispanic convenience store owners as part of a drug bust. Credit to the makeup crew, I can't tell which is Shawn and which is Marlon when they're in disguise, but I don't really care. The two play Hispanic men like refugees from a 1950s Warner Brothers cartoon. One dances wildly to Latin music and speaks in a high, nasally voice. The other mugs at every opportunity and fakes Spanish by speaking in song lyrics. White Chicks is a comedy of stereotypes, and none are spared. If that sort of thing is funny to you, then I may have found your perfect movie.
There's a plot in here, about the two getting stuck babysitting a couple of Hilton sister wannabes to protect them from the threat of a kidnapper, then having to take their place at a major social event when the girls are unable to attend themselves. But it's hard to care about that either; this movie is so relentlessly stupid that it seems to be actively working to distract the audience from the story, just to throw in one more slaptick gag, fart joke or tired cliche.
But as I said, the movie isn't as bad as I expected, and full credit for that goes to Mister Terry Crewes, the only reason I laughed at this movie at all. Crewes plays an NBA star -- as I said, this movie isn't big on intelligence -- with what I will politely refer to as a "passion" for white women. Crewes' willingness to play the clown, including a scene of him jamming to Vanessa Carlton's "1000 Miles", just barely saved the movie for me.
The rest of it is just wrong. Apart from the endless stereotyping, there's also the movie's deliberate ignorance of how stage prosthetics work. When the Agents Wayans decide to take the place of the cut-rate Kardashians, they get full body prosthetics made to turn their Black male selves into white women. Over the course of the movie, we will see the two change out of and back into these prosthetic getups as though they were changing shirts. This doesn't happen; that stuff takes hours and a team of technicians to apply correctly. I know it's a movie, but you can only suspend disbelief so far. And since this is a movie about men posing as women, there will be the obligatory, tacked-on pauses to beat that dead horse about how Women Suffer and Men Don't Get It. I seem to be saying this a lot in my reviews lately: I don't dispute that, but this point is so well worn it has a groove in it. How about a lecture about how my Toyota is killing polar bears, for a change?
There's something to be said for a little mindless entertainment, but this is too much. Find yourself a supercut of Terry Crewes to get this movie's best bits, and save yourself the trouble.
White Chicks is rated PG-13 for crude and sexual humor, language and some drug content.
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