Two of the writers and directors of Comedy Central’s very funny
Broad City, plus one of its stars, concoct a dark, zealously silly plot—five bachelorette partiers accidentally kill a male stripper and attempt a cover-up—that would be at home on the show. But the movie is the length of five episodes, stretching the premise beyond its breaking point, and director Lucia Aniello (who co-wrote with Paul W. Downs) seems to have thought that it needs emotional grounding. So instead of embracing its two-dimensional farcicality, the movie tries to pass its stock characters off as real people. Why is it so hard to commit to fast-paced, door-slamming, identity-mistaking, body-hiding farce? Anyway, Scarlett Johansson plays the bride-to-be, a political candidate who’s starting to forget her friends: clingy Alice (Jillian Bell); rich Blair (Zoe Kravitz); lesbian activist Frankie (
Broad City’s Ilana Glazer); and Australian kook Pippa (Kate McKinnon). There are scattered chuckles, but the group lacks chemistry and Aniello never gets the energy up to the zippy level required to pull off such mania.
By
Eric D. Snider