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Tom Neven

Movie Review

Kevin and Marcus Copeland are brothers and fellow FBI agents with a penchant for going it alone—and for blowing cases. After ruining a drug sting the brothers are assigned to something they can’t ruin: guarding two bubblehead socialites who have been threatened with kidnapping. The setup is too convoluted and illogical to bother with here, but suffice it to say that to save their own careers, the brothers call in a team of makeup experts—from where we’re never told—to build prosthetic faces and other parts of the female anatomy so that the African-American male agents can pass for the “white chicks.” All that matters after that are the jokes.

Positive Elements

In a backdoor way, White Chicks condemns our culture’s obsession with looks. Also, in hanging out with girls the Copeland brothers learn to be more understanding of the fairer sex. They also encourage a much-put-upon girl to stop being a doormat when it comes to rich guys. One of the brothers stresses his fidelity to his wife, even though she seemingly has good reason to think he’s cheating on her.

Sexual Content

From crude sex to implied bestiality to homosexual double entendres, the film wallows in sexualized muck. It credits six screenwriters, and it seems each was trying to top—um, make that bottom—the others in a race for the gutter. It’s truly a wonder how it avoided an R rating.

One girl brags that she sleeps with everyone’s boyfriends. A man narrows the time window that would have allowed him to cheat on his wife to two minutes, and by the look on her face she implies that was still enough time. When being fitted for the body prosthetics, one man gasps at feeling his “breasts,” at which one of the makeup artists says, “He’s right. Make them bigger.” Numerous fake breasts jokes ensue.

Teenage boys make crude sexual comments about each woman they encounter. A man makes an extremely crude comment about having sex with black men. That same man wins a date with one of the undercover men in a charity auction. Later, he implies that he considers flatulence a sexual turn-on. One man slips an aphrodisiac into the drink of a woman, who notices and switches drinks when he’s not looking. As the drug starts to take effect, he starts making suggestive comments to a dog.

Two FBI agents pass the time by daring each other to have sex with celebrity women who have yeast infections. One of those agents later sniffs a pair of underwear. Intending to expose the fraudulent socialites, they strip the clothing off the real women by mistake. (Nothing is seen except the men’s reaction.) Several times Kevin and Marcus are in the same room with other girls who are changing clothes, and they ogle the underwear-clad bodies.

The movie is also chockfull of skimpy outfits, girls in bikinis or underwear, suggestive dancing and lesbian jokes. A rap song called “White Girls” plays over the closing credits, and its lyrics manage to be more offensive than the movie itself.

Violent Content

A blown drug sting results first in a fistfight and, later, a shootout, but no one is shot. In a later gun battle, though, two men receive superficial wounds. A man punches another squarely in the face, bloodying his nose. Another one runs down a purse-snatcher and tackles him on the sidewalk. Two FBI agents beat up a pair of male strippers, mistaking them for kidnappers. The real kidnapper threatens bystanders with a gun.

Crude or Profane Language

God’s name is abused close to 30 times, a couple times with “d–n.” Jesus’ name is also sharply misused. The s-word appears two or three times. The word “frikken” is used often as a substitute for the f-word. The n-word, “jigaboo,” “b–ch,” “skanks” and “Beverly Ho-billies” are all trotted out with impunity.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Various characters smoke cigars or cigarettes throughout. One man opens his fridge to find nothing but beer and a Chinese meal. Several scenes are set during social occasions with drinking. One teen drinks wine directly from a bottle. A girl insults her rivals by calling them the “Fen-Fen twins.” (Fen-Fen is a now-banned diet drug.) A man slips an aphrodisiac into a drink.

Other Negative Elements

Potty humor permeates this film. One socialite asks a man to clean her dog’s carrying case but warns that the animal did not have his colonic cleansing that day. An extended scene features a flatulence-plagued person, complete with loud sound effects. Later, one of the men in drag tries to dissuade an amorous suitor by passing gas loudly. The suitor responds by surpassing the first by several decibels. (Restaurant patrons are seen holding their noses and gagging.) In another attempt to ward off the man’s sexual advances, he puts his foot on the restaurant table and makes a big show of biting a hangnail off his big toe and spitting it at him; it ricochets off his forehead into another patron’s drink. Rivals engage in escalating “yo’ momma” insults.

Conclusion

This is basically a one-joke movie dragged through the toilet on the way to the boudoir. It does, however, raise an interesting question: If a white person made a movie poking fun at black people in the same way, how would it be received? Would it even be made? To be sure, the Wayans brothers’ main target is not white people as such but superficial, self-obsessed people who happen to be white. (The silliest character in the movie is black.) Still, it’s a worthy question.

Based on their consistent output over the years, the Wayans seem to have stopped maturing in the sixth grade, such is the level of their humor. Also, as with so many of their films, White Chicks contains so many leaps of logic that even Superman would need more than a single bound to get past them. And the racial stereotyping, while intended to be funny, simply falls flat. This is a crude, rude and just plain bad flop of a flick, and it insults the intelligence of everyone, no matter what color you are.

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Tom Neven