White Chicks

Two black FBI agents find themselves in hot water with their boss and must baby-sit a couple of New York billionaire socialites, in order to get back into his good graces. Unfortunately, they mess that gig up as well and must now transform themselves into the white chicks in question, in order to keep their jobs and solve the case. Just go with it!! Black guys pretending to be white girls…ensues.

The fact that I went into this movie expecting it to be on my “worst of the year” list, yet came out recommending it (at least for home viewing), might give you an idea of how the humor in this film ultimately might win some over as well, especially since there wasn’t an instant in this film’s trailer that hadn’t made me want to gag myself with a spoon. That said, I don’t foresee my mom and dad rolling into their Taurus, heading down to the local Cineplex and ordering a couple of tickets to see the Wayans brothers acting like white chicks for an hour and a half, but if preview audiences for this film are any indication, teens might be lining up for this movie on opening day and absolutely blaring in laughter at its many black/white jokes, much like the audience with whom I caught my screening. In fact, it had been a while since I had seen a film that had an audience laughing so hard that it actually overlapped over the film’s next line, but this one had a couple of such moments. Granted, many of its “moments” featured black guys acting like white girls acting like black guys (wait until you see the “girls” get down to Run DMC’s “It’s Tricky”), shitting, farting, PMS’ing, biting toenails off with mouths and spitting them into champagne glasses and so forth, but like I always say, humor is subjective, so if you’re in the right frame of mind, some of this may crack you up as well. For me, half of the humor in the film worked, particularly anything to do with Marlon’s girl character, who was cute as a button when she squinted, actor Terry Crews (stealing every scene from the brothers and built like a brick house to boot!), anyone singing along to “1000 Miles” by Vanessa Carlton (I’m not even sure why this is so funny…it just is!) and a number of random “fish out of water” sequences.

God knows I might not laugh at these things if I watch the movie again in a year, but tonight…half of it was funny. And by the way, the guys transformed into the white girls don’t look anything like the real girls, and actually look extremely creepy in a sort of “I don’t want to look, but I can’t help it” way, but that sort of grew on me as well…kind of like a fungus. Some of their one-liners were also pretty good, including “Martha Stewart broke or MC Hammer broke?”, “Blackie Chan!” and the obvious play on the word “nigga”, which freaks a few white girls out at first, only to be subdued once they are reminded that there are no black people around to hear them. That reminded me of that old SNL Eddie Murphy sketch where he dressed up like a white man and noticed how differently white people acted around each other, when there were no black people around. Hilarious skit! Incidentally, the film does make fun of both white and black stereotypes, but the white ones are mostly of “rich, snooty” white folk, so it likely won’t bother them much, while the black stereotypes have to do with the men being “dogs” and having big dicks, and the women being suspicious of their men and having great asses…not exactly the worst things to be stereotyped as, eh? As for the story, it’s about as lame as they come, but they really don’t concentrate on it much, and rather use its loose parameters to provide the Wayans’ brothers open season to act out a variety of skits. That is until the film’s finale which goes idiotically over-the-top with a weak fashion show and an even weaker shoot-out. In the end, this is a dumb comedy written by six people (!!) that won’t win any “artistic” awards but does toss enough hotties, toilet humor, visual gags and one-liners into the mix, as to make you forget how clichéd and unsubstantial it really is.

(c) 2021 Berge Garabedian