White Chicks

Dir. Keenen Ivory Wayans

White Chicks is about a pair of ne’er-do-well FBI agents (Shawn and Marlon Wayans) who’re assigned to escort a pair of rich-“rhymes-with-witch” heiresses to the Hamptons and end up having to get into white-girl drag since the women won’t go to the Hamptons themselves (car accident, mild scratch, the horror). That gets the premise out of the way. Actually, for a Wayans brothers film that’s plenty of premise to hang the gags on - Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood and Scary Movie were hardly models of Aristotlean plot unity, but they made you laugh.

Unlike other men-in-drag films (I’m looking at you, Rob Schneider), White Chicks gets more laughs from its satire of black-white relations and the Hamptons scene than from gender differences, for which this reviewer at least is thankful. Men may be from Mars and women from Venus, but neither needs another show to remind us of the supposed different ways the sexes approach the world (I’m looking at you, Mel Gibson). Of course, the black-white satire in the W.C. nowhere approaches the sharpness of Dave Chappelle, the identification of “A Thousand Miles” as a classic ’tune that only white women like’ notwithstanding (did Vanessa Carlton okay this? Good for her. Where’s her career these days, anyway?). The Wayans have always been goofballs, and White Chicks lacks the bite you might expect from Chappelle or Chris Rock.The targets here are fairly obvious: the general condescension towards waitstaff of different ethnicities and the ridiculous self-loathing of rich women in dressing rooms. And these are the Wayans, so there are fart jokes - as flatulence jokes go, they’re not bad, actually, but if you don’t like them stay clear. Near the end, the film becomes standard wrap-it-up revelations, losing a bit of its comedic touch; worse yet, everyone learns a lesson in life. As Keenen’s character in Don’t Be a Menace might have said, “Message!”

Still, White Chicks provided some serious laugh-out-loud moments, including a dance contest won through the agents’ breakdancing ability and a back-and-forth of “your mama’s so…” snaps. Terry Crews, in particular, is a hoot as Latrell Spencer, the persistent black basketball player who’s only after white women (he gets called “Buffy the White Girl Slayer”). Crews deftly portrays the mix of ego and secret insecurity of Spencer while maintaining him as a figure to be laughed at. And at the end of it all, you can see how unequal women have it at the supposed top echelon of society - auctioned off for charity, existing only as Daddy’s girls, preening in order to maintain their social status. Chris Rock has a whole standup routine on how being white brings a tremendous amount of inherent privileges (“There isn’t a single white person in this audience who would be willing to trade places with me, and I’m RICH”); given the confines of rich-white-girl life shown in White Chicks, it may be worth refining that proposition.