★★½
(MA) 101 minutes
The freeform US sitcom Broad City is one of the funniest shows on TV, and one of the most pointed. As hipster doofuses navigating the wilds of Brooklyn, Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson are at once burlesque feminist heroines and the real thing.
One of the key forces behind the show (alongside co-creators Glazer and Jacobson) is writer-director Lucia Aniello, whose first feature Rough Night shares some of the same concerns. But by her standards it's a letdown, as if she'd been hired to reinvent the chick flick only to be forced back onto mainstream territory after all.
Scarlett Johansson stars as the hardworking Jess, a would-be senator about to get married to the easygoing Peter (Paul W. Downs). Reluctantly, she agrees to take a break, heading out to Miami with her four besties: aggressively loyal Alice (Jillian Bell), politically correct Frankie (Glazer), tightly-wound Blair (Zoe Kravitz), and Australian free spirit Pippa (Kate McKinnon).
There, a wild night out culminates in the accidental death of a male stripper – and given Jess' need to avoid scandal, that's where the trouble really starts.
It's an authentically provocative premise, given that the other male characters are painted as pushovers or predators, and that Jess – a politician facing an oafish male opponent – is clearly meant to remind us of Hillary Clinton.
The film could have worked if it had embraced the illicit fantasy at its core – if the characters were allowed to enjoy the thrill of killing a man and getting away with it. But Aniello shies away, never finding a tone that would allow her to fuse edgy black comedy with the genre's mandatory celebration of female friendship.
Besides this, the ensemble doesn't quite gel. Glazer is stuck playing a one-dimensional variant of her Broad City persona, and Bell, who has more dramatic weight to carry, is a performer who works best in small doses. With little track record in comedy, Johansson and Kravitz act mainly as foils rather than generating laughs in themselves.
That leaves McKinnon, who not for the first time is the saving grace. After a good many flat jokes about vibrators and Twitter, there's a flood of relief when she finally shows up, baring her teeth and waving like a maniac.
As for her accent, the American actress doesn't get every Aussie vowel right, but to complain about this is to misunderstand the nature of caricature. After all, there are plenty of actual Australians in Hollywood if Aniello had wanted one.
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