Review: Girls Trip (15)

Sugar and spice and all things nice '“ that's not what the girls who appear in director Malcolm D Lee's raucous comedy are made of.
OLD FRIENDS: The stars of the comedy Girls Trip, out in cinemas today.OLD FRIENDS: The stars of the comedy Girls Trip, out in cinemas today.
OLD FRIENDS: The stars of the comedy Girls Trip, out in cinemas today.

Indeed, the central quartet of fun-loving forty-somethings are more likely to smear the ingredients of the 19th century nursery rhyme over their naked body parts, or chug them down with absinthe.

Girls Trip performs a brazen gender-flip on films like The Hangover and dispatches four life-long friends – Ryan (Regina Hall), Sasha (Latifah), Lisa (Pinkett Smith) and Dina (Haddish) – whose busy schedules have kept them apart for five years on a trip to New Orleans to make embarrassing memories they can laugh about for the rest of their lives.

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Scriptwriters Kenya Harris and Tracy Oliver certainly don’t spare the characters’ blushes.

The ace in the film’s hole is comedian Tiffany Haddish, who blows all of her co-stars off the screen with a virtuoso performance reminiscent of Melissa McCarthy’s scene-stealing turn in Bridesmaids.

Girls Trip succeeds where so many adult-oriented comedies falter: it delivers a barrage of deafening laughs, sweetened by winning chemistry between the lead actors.

Lee’s picture is an all-you-can-eat buffet of naughty but nice. It is a delirious guilty pleasure.