Haddish an absolute laugh riot in raunchy ‘Girls Trip’
Every minute spent with Tiffany Haddish in “Girls Trip” is a joy.
A rude-and-crude joy, to be sure, but a joy nonetheless.
The comedienne and actress is the most uproarious part of what is a rather uproarious — and almost-altogether-terrific — raunchy comedy about four longtime friends who reunite for a wild weekend in New Orleans, a weekend that will, of course, test the strength of their collective bond.
Back in the day, Ryan (Regina Hall), Lisa (Jada Pinkett Smith), Sasha (Queen Latifah) and Dina (Haddish) were an inseparable crew, the “Flossy Posse.” A couple of decades or so later, they all have their own lives and don’t see each other all that often.
Ryan is the most successful — she is a bestselling author, who, with her retired-NFL-player husband, Stewart (Mike Colter of “Luke Cage”), have become a valuable brand thanks to their seemingly perfect coupledom.
Sasha writes a prominent celebrity-gossip blog, a site where she alleged, for example, that one part of Kevin Hart’s body was aging faster than the rest.
Lisa is a nurse and single mother of two who lives with her mom and is a bit uptight.
And then there’s Dina, whom we meet as she’s getting fired from her job after violently attacking a coworker she believes ate her Go-Gurt on purpose. (The flashback to the incident is hilarious.)
Ryan is bound for New Orleans, where she’ll be a speaker at the Essence Festival, an event that will bring many black women to the city for an epic party. While there, she also hopes to close a deal with a bigbox store that wants to sell lifestyle products based on her and her husband’s fairytale existence, and she decides she wants to bring her ladies along for a good time.
On the trip, the women, Dina especially, are concerned with making sure Lisa has an overdue encounter with a man — maybe any man. Meanwhile, Sasha is trying to conceal money problems, as her blog, Sasha’s Secrets, isn’t paying enough of the bills of late. But, it turns out, it is Ryan who has the biggest problem: Stewart has been cheating on her — and she’s known about it, which shocks her friends.
That fact leads to Dina going into beast mode when she sees Stewart in the high-class hotel in which they would have been staying. (Their room is swiped by them after Dina breaks a bottle of wine and threatens Stewart with it in the middle of the hotel’s beautiful bar.)
What follows — for just a bit too long — is a nice mix of partying and problems. The partying is hysterical, especially when absynth makes an appearance, leading to a scene in a club that is delightfully outrageous. The problems, on the other hand, are relatable, “Girls Trip” slowly going from absurd to real throughout the course of its two hours.
Before its tale is told, expect a real friendship crisis, as well as some well-executed heartfelt moments.
The conductor of this mad-but-moving symphony is director Malcolm D. Lee (“The Best Man” franchise, “Barbershop: The Next Cut”). Working from a screenplay by Kenya Barris (“Blackish”) and Tracy Oliver (“Barbershop: The Next Cut”), Lee knows how to find the comedy in the moments. Let no one say “Girls Trip” is ever flat.