White Chicks Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)June 28th, 2004
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We've seen films where characters pretend to be women (from Some Like it Hot to Sorority Boys), pretend to be men (the seminal Just One of the Guys) or don makeup to "switch" color (Soul Man), but we've never seen the sex and race swap done in the same film. You can kind of picture the Wayans brothers making the same observation, while smoking dope and playing cards or something. I hope that's the genesis for the horribly shallow idea that eventually became White Chicks. If drugs weren't involved, sterilization should be.
Marlon (the one who was in The Ladykillers and Requiem for a Dream) and Shawn Wayans (the one who can't get a non-Wayans film job) play Kevin and Marcus Copeland, a pair of Manhattan-based FBI agents-slash-brothers who, after a botched attempt to bring down a drug kingpin, find themselves demoted to bodyguard duty by their grumbling boss (Frankie Faison - who else?). Kevin and Marcus are to accompany a Hilton-esque set of sisters (Maitland Ward and Anne Dudek) out to the Hamptons for the big Labor Day weekend blowout. Seems there's some kind of kidnapping plot in the works. Whatever.
Kevin and Marcus screw up (it's what they do) and nearly kill the girls. Somehow, this evolves into them donning intricate prosthetic disguises so Kevin and Marcus will be able to pose as Brittany and Tiffany and, ideally, sniff out the kidnappers from the inside. The prosthetics make the Wayans, who are already tough to tell apart (they're the black Olsen twins), even more unidentifiable. They look like the offspring of a tryst between Michael Jackson and Tori Spelling. None of this, of course, raises any red flags with the Hamptons crowd - even the sisters' freaky hands, which are long and grey, like ET's.
What follows is inconsequential and offers only a few laughs in the form of fart jokes and a Mom Rank Out competition. There is no serious exploration of differences between the races and/or classes. That Eddie Murphy number from Saturday Night Live where he pretended to be white offered a much funnier and much richer satire. Chicks tells us only that white people are dumb, rich people are shallow, and NBA players can't take no for an answer.
Chicks is directed by the normally reliable (at least in scatological humor circles) Keenen Ivory Wayans, who has crafted winning spoofs of blaxploitation (I'm Gonna Git You, Sucka), South Central flicks (Don't Be a Menace...) and modern American horror (Scary Movie). Chicks is, best I can tell, a spoof of The Simple Life. And it's not even a good one, at that. The film's laundry list of writers turn a sketch-sized premise into a staggeringly long 105 minutes. For that, they should be tied down and forced to watch A Lowdown Dirty Shame.
1:45 - PG-13 for crude and sexual humor, language and some drug content
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
