Movie Review: 'Girls Trip'

The trailer for Girls Trip made the film look like a nightmare. With a heavy focus on raunchy, gross-out body humor and the most simplistic gloss of #GirlPower, the trailer makes the movie look like a borderline minstrel show of black women. Before you get mad at my glib deconstruction of the trailer and my incendiary language, please try to understand that I am setting the stage to turn around and tell you how much I genuinely enjoyed the movie Girls Trip.

The trailer is bad, there is no question about that, and it is made up of scenes from the film which aren’t all that manipulated from their filmic context. But, it’s also just a trailer. It’s just two and a half minutes, and it’s not the job of the trailer to tell us who these characters are. The trailer is a broad brush of the story of Girls Trip, and while it is a genuinely terrible broad brush, having now seen the film I can say that I get the trailer even as I don’t like the trailer.

Here’s the story: a successful, Martha Stewart/Kelly Ripa-esque woman, Ryan Pierce, played by Regina Hall, is on the verge of accomplishing all her Oprah-like ambition. Alongside her remarkably handsome, former football player husband, think Tiki Barber crossed with Michael Strahan, played by Mike Colter, she is close to building her empire. But, as you can imagine, and because this is a movie, her life is not all that it seems on its serenely beautiful surface.

This comes to light when Ryan is set to be honored by Essence Magazine in New Orleans and Ryan decides this is the perfect opportunity to reunite with her wacky college friends, then known as the Flossy Posse (I missed what that referred to, otherwise I would try to explain the name). They are Sasha (Queen Latifah), a former journalist turned celebrity gossip hound, Lisa (Jada Pinkett-Smith), the mom of the group, and Dina (Tiffany Haddish), the wild child-troublemaker of the group with a mouth that would make Seth Rogan blush.

I am going to stop the plot description there as there isn’t much more to the plot. The rest of the movie is based in characters and dialogue, of old and new hurts coming to light, the shorthand of a real-life friendship. It’s a movie built on humorous reminiscences and the way that the people we hold closest to our hearts don’t have to be blood relatives to be family and how those that know us, the closest ones, can hurt us the most, help us the most and love us more than anyone else.

Girls Trip was directed by Malcolm D. Lee who isn’t the most distinguished director but what he has over many other filmmakers is a big silly heart and a love of people that flows from the characters he helps to create. A look at Lee’s filmography backs up my assertion. His debut feature The Best Man despite being a light and fluffy look at life, love, and friendship was oddly revolutionary because instead of focusing on the most well-known aspects of the Black experience in America, it placed black characters in the same conventional, comic context that white ensembles had embodied to the point of exhaustion.

Simply making an African American fronted romantic comedy and placing his Black characters in the simplest, most relatable context was bizarrely, comically, revolutionary because of how few films like The Best Man had ever been made before. It wasn’t removed from race as a subject, but most of that context is foisted upon the film from people like me who marvel at how something so fun happens to also be so incidentally historic.

The Best Man has defined Lee’s career as it spawned a hit Christmas themed sequel and yet another sequel coming next year. Lee then showed off a talent for broad comedy with the terribly underrated Undercover Brother, and showed he could bring comedy and social commentary together in Barbershop The Next Cut.

Lee has become one of the most consistently entertaining directors working today and Girls Trip encapsulates what makes Lee so great. First element is a big silly heart, a taste for the lowbrow that isn't too lowbrow, and finally, wonderfully lovable characters. Regina Hall is the heart of Girls Trip as Ryan and despite the inherent cliches that she stands for, Hall finds a depth to Ryan well-beyond the creaky, predictable aspects of this character.

Is Girls Trip a great movie? No, but it's very watchable and quite entertaining movie. It sports the same likable qualities of The Best Man movies and the same ability to find pathos, light drama, and realistic conflict without losing sight of the laughs.