Most movies require some suspension of disbelief. But White Chicks, a comedy starring the brothers Marlon and Shawn Wayans as African-American F.B.I. agents who disguise themselves as dippy white socialites for a weekend in the Hamptons, requires something more radical than that. A full frontal lobotomy might be a good place to start.
Dressed up in their white-girl drag -- the celebutantes they are impersonating, the Wilson sisters, are obviously based on Nikki and Paris Hilton -- the Wayans brothers look as if they've just lumbered in from Dawn of the Dead.
PHOTO COURTESY OF UNIVERSAL
With rubber prosthetics making their faces all but immobile and blue contact lenses giving them that much sought-after vacant-eyed zombie look, they're scarier than anything in Scary Movie and Scary Movie 2, the last two films in which, like this one, they starred under the direction of their older brother, Keenen Ivory Wayans.
And yet when Marcus (Marlon Wayans) and Kevin (Shawn Wayans) show up at the Royal Hamptons Hotel in full drag -- impersonating the Wilson sisters to protect them from kidnappers -- they're immediately accepted by the sisters' three best friends (Busy Philipps, Jennifer Carpenter and Jessica Cauffiel). If it's possible to libel spoiled, empty-headed socialites, the Wayans have done it: nobody could be this stupid.
Nobody, that is, except for another character in this movie. The former National Football League player Terry Crews plays the equivalent of the Joe E. Brown character in this thoroughly dumbed-down, perhaps even unintentional remake of Some Like It Hot.
He's Latrell Spencer, a wealthy, Sean Combs-ish character who develops a crush on Marcus, the smaller of the two agents and slightly more credible in his miniskirts. The huge, heavily muscled Mr. Crews, who must be a wonderful sport, takes the brunt of the humiliating physical gags that make up the only real comic strategy of White Chicks, suffering countless insults to his
masculinity and bearing.
All of this seems to be a way for the Wayans brothers to deflect the sexually subversive aspect of female impersonation. Not only are they carefully, emphatically marked as not gay -- one has been provided with a jealous wife (Faune Chambers), the other with a potential love interest in the form of an attractive television reporter (Rochelle Aytes) -- but they are also prohibited from taking any surreptitious pleasure in their masquerade, as the Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon characters did so memorably in Some Like It Hot.
Instead of making any surprising discoveries about themselves in their new identities, either as women or as whites of a privileged class, Marcus and Kevin seem just as blandly insensitive at the end of the film as at the beginning, though Marcus does learn to listen when his wife tries to talk to him.
Credibility, of course, wouldn't matter if the gags were good enough, which they are not. The film quickly falls back on the gross-out jokes that have made recent US comedies such a challenge to the digestive tract. As the Wayans brothers make sport with most of the known bodily fluids -- and seem even to discover some new ones in the process -- you may find your dinner plans fading away. White Chicks has been rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned), for crude humor and a fleeting drug joke.
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