Starring: Rose Byrne, Salma Hayek, and Tiffany Haddish. Also, Jennifer Coolidge, Ari Gaynor, Billy Porter
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Runtime: 83 mins. Reviewed in Jan 2020
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This American comedy tells the story of two women, who start up a company together. Things take a turn for the worse, when a manipulative, helping hand enters their life and puts their business enterprise at risk.
Mel (Rose Byrne) and Mia (Tiffany Haddish) are two friends, with contrasting personalities, who decide to go into business together to start a beauty company. They have been close friends for a long time. On the business front, Mel is practical; she is business-wise, but lacks confidence. Mia, on the other hand, is keen to live a good lifestyle; she wants to earn a fortune as quickly as possible, and has a confident, assertive personality. Together, they decide to launch their own cosmetics product and they open a store to sell it.
They end up over $480k in debt, and are forced to seek help from a wealthy, unscrupulous benefactor, Claire (Salma Hayek), who offers to bail the company out of trouble. Claire knows the value of what they are selling, and secretly wants ownership of their product for herself. She contracts with them to put them at a complete business disadvantage. The stress of the situation forces Mia and Mel to confront their differences and their friendship begins to fracture. Claire is caricatured as a female boss, who is a version of someone everyone can find a reason to dislike. Claire causes major tensions in the friendship between Mia and Mel – Mel wants to find a way out of hardship, while Mia resents Claire taking control.
This is a raunchy film that spends much of its time showing women engaged in behaviour that stereotypes objectionable male behaviour. The women take drugs, have sex freely, and enjoy getting drunk. The result of it all is a film that regularly insults women. An image of a novelty cake emerging bloodily out of a woman’s vagina illustrates the tone. Mia and Mel are revolted by the cake, but it is featured on screen for laughs.
What saves the movie from a complete downside is its emphasis on the friendship between Mel and Mia. The bond between them survives through thick and thin, and the movie conveys a friendship that credibly outlasts the tensions. Mia and Mel emerge from the chaos strong, and better friends than before, and together they outsmart Claire.
Both Byrne and Haddish, as Mel and Mia, demonstrate good chemistry together, and both of them try their best to extract smiles from a very crude script. The film has some amusing moments, but there are not a lot of them. The film as a whole attempts to capture the over-the-top comedy of “Bridesmaids” (2011) which combined a sentimental plot-line with bawdy humour to convey the complexities of female friendship.
The humour of trying to do just that comes at a price. Not many women would be all that keen to have their bodies discussed as negatively on the cinema screen as this movie does, and in a crude way. There are some disparaging comments about men’s body parts as well. The film shows people in the end apologising for their misdeeds, but the damage at that stage is too much to repair, given memories of the vagina cake.
This is a shallow film about women empowerment. Its plot-line has contrived scenarios, and demonstrates little character development, while straining to find comedy. It raises smiles, but it also has moments of genuine embarrassment.
The movie is written by two male script-writers, and directed by a man, and it is all about how women relate meaningfully to each other. Female friendship is captured well, but the viewer is asked to tolerate a lot of male and female crudity along the way.
Peter W. Sheehan is Associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting
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