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Stereotypes and stupid jokes doom 'White Chicks'
Director: Keenen Ivory Wayans
Stars: Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Anne Dudek
MPAA rating: PG-13, for crude and sexual humor, language and some drug content
Someone should suggest plausibility to the Wayans brothers, whose "White Chicks" defies every effort to read it as a mere exaggeration of reality. It delivers every gag with a baseball bat.
The "White Chicks" story was devised by director Keenen Ivory Wayans and brothers Marlon and Shawn. The screenplay was by them and three others.
Virtually every character in the picture is sub-stupid, which might flatter the audience but which leaves the picture without a bedrock of reality on which to build its ... OK, really stupid jokes.
Like we needed more flatulence competitions and another horrific bathroom sequence.
Brothers Marcus and Kevin Copeland (off-screen brothers Marlon and Shawn Wayans, respectively) are FBI agent-partners who bungle an arrest.
In an attempt to redeem themselves, they accept responsibility for protecting from a possible kidnap plot Tiffany and Brittany Wilson (Anne Dudek and Maitland Ward, respectively), who are planning to visit the Hamptons for a huge social blowout.
The brothers are black. The sisters are two white, screaming narcissistic socialite nitwits, which describes virtually every other woman in the picture.
The least of the film's implausibilities is that the sisters agree to be sequestered, in seemingly modest digs, and to miss the Hampton events they live for.
A team of makeup experts teaches the brothers in a flash how to make themselves up as white women and to pass themselves off to dozens of people who know the Wilson sisters.
It's not clear how funny and/or ridiculous it's supposed to be that the guys look as if they're wearing cheap plastic masks and ice blue albino contact lenses right out of "Village of the Damned."
Only a couple of the Wilsons' acquaintances acknowledge even the slightest change in them.
Is it fun if the joke is enveloped in an assumption that no one can see?
Is the fostering of offensive racial stereotypes such as the millionaire black basketball player (Terry Crews) who thinks he can buy any woman and who happens to be obsessed with white ones, especially those with crude body habits?
There's a token nod toward the insight of "Tootsie" when one of the brothers says, "Sometimes I wish (men) could trade places (with women) so they'd know how it feels."
Somehow, "White Chicks" diminishes when it dabbles in a token romantic relationship between Kevin and Denise (Rochelle Aytes) and a misunderstanding between Marcus and wife Gina (Faune A. Chambers).
Oh, and if the notion of a fashion show going awry feels like deja vu, you probably saw "Raising Helen," which opened just four weeks ago.
