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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
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for
crude and sexual humor, language and some drug content |
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