Critics reviews

A funny, filthy comedy that has given the world both a mini Set It Off reunion, and the year's best fruit-assisted blow-job joke.

These women have substance even though their characters are thinly written, and the film's comedic flourishes offer a refreshing frankness about sex from women's perspectives. The view of middle-class African-American women's lives behind closed doors, despite its antic exaggeration, has a lived-in specificity. Lee's direction doesn't offer much style or vigor, but Haddish delivers a wild yet precise performance of verbal and gestural fury that puts her at the forefront of contemporary comedy.

Lee, perhaps best known for directing The Best Man (1999) and its sequel, stumbles here and there in the filmmaking — the movie has more than its share of awkward or outright bad shots — but not enough to distract you from the real trophy here: the chemistry of its stars... At its best, Girls Trip is wild and loose, rough around the edges, but nonetheless ample proof black women can have it all: friends, professional satisfaction, and raunch comedy, too.

At least it goes down easy. Easy like a Sunday-morning hangover.

Among the four stars of Girls Trip... Tiffany Haddish is the least well-known, having bounced around in minor roles on film and television before landing a spot as a series regular on The Carmichael Show. All that stands to change overnight. As Dina, a pleasure-seeker of unapologetic, bull-in-a-china-shop relentlessness, Haddish is so incandescently filthy that a new ratings system should be developed to accommodate her.

Bridesmaids proved that women could be just as smutty onscreen as men, but this fast-paced comedy is ruder, cruder, funnier, and more explicit... Nimbly choreographed sequences involve heavy drinking, cat fights, bodily functions, and a novel, sloppy fellatio technique involving grapefruit that Haddish graphically demonstrates.

All three of these actresses seem to know that this is Haddish's breakout moment, and they step aside accordingly. A comedian whose credits include "The Carmichael Show" and "Keanu," Haddish approaches every scene with a positively joyous ferocity; she elevates vulgarity to a verbal and gestural art form.

The movie is effectively a narrative striptease. Characters... take some of it off, the "it" being the cultural and social norms that define and often restrict them: the veneer of respectability, the accommodating smiles, the regulation control... "Girls Trip" adds complexity to the picture by bringing in class, even as it dispatches with whiteness, showing it the door so that these women can find themselves while rediscovering the power and pleasures of sisterhood.

Truth in advertising: Girls trip hard during their New Orleans getaway in Girls Trip, which maybe doesn't need that possessive apostrophe after all. Malcolm D. Lee's comedy, written by Kenya Barris and Tracy Oliver — the same creative team behind last year's uneven Barbershop: The Next Cut — pops with next-level ribaldry and smack talk, especially in its first half. But in the remaining hour, the laughs arrive less often as the gender politics grow weirder.

It succeeds where the others have failed. It's hard to say whether that's thanks to Lee's characteristically breezy, no-sweat direction or to the movie's buoyant and superbly matched cast. Most likely it's a secret cocktail combo of both. Girls Trip is just fun, a movie that—even within the context of its broad, exaggerated humor—never seems to be trying too hard.