First Hit: It started wonderfully, but as it wore on, it really felt a lot longer than its 1 hour 50 minute running time.
How the seedy world of strippers, lap dancing, and pole dancing is presented in the opening fifteen minutes was excellent. We arrive into the film on the back of the new Asian girl Dorothy, stage name Destiny (Constance Wu) trying to find her way into making enough money to help her grandmother (Wai Ching Ho) keep her home. The first set of scenes also include Dorothy sitting dressed up in a pristine office environment being interviewed by Elizabeth (Julia Stiles), a journalist. We now know that the club and stripper scenes are a flashback.
Back in the club, after watching Ramona (Jennifer Lopez), a veteran stripper and pole dancer, give a money showering performance at their club, Dorothy asks Ramona for some tips on how to be a better dancer and use her “money maker.”
Ramona, knows the ropes, was raised with a healthy streetwise attitude, and now lives a charming place and raising her daughter independently. Dorothy sees all this and would simply like to make enough money to support her grandmother and herself - independently.
They start working together and create a gang of four girls by adding Mercedes (Keke Palmer) and Annabelle (Lili Reinhart) to maximize their money-making potential. As they all work men together in the lap dancing rooms, they start making some good money and begin to control the cut the club takes. Most all the men they work, are either independently wealthy or are in the finance trade as investment or stock brokers.
Disaster happens when the market busts in 2008 and the men, from whom they make their livelihood, lose their jobs or are squeezed too much to spend money on girls in a strip club.
The group falls apart, and now Dorothy is living with a boyfriend, and they have a child together. After she kicks her boyfriend out, she has to get a job. Not having appropriate experience, we see in a funny scene where she gets turned down for a cosmetic sales job and ends up back in the club to strip. But now, it’s filled with women who give blow jobs for $300 bucks and she just cannot stomach this kind of work.
Running into Ramona, they get the team back together and create a scheme to entice and fleece men of their money. To do this, they drug them with a mix of ketamine and MDMA to induce memory loss and causing judgment impairment. Once the girls slip this mixture into their target’s drinks, they charge a large transaction on their credit card, and split the money while the men have no idea how it happened.
The girls get greedy and start charging large amounts, $50K or more, on the men’s credit cards. Soon the men quit meeting up with them for dates. After a time, the deceit catches up with them, and in one scene, Dorothy gets a call from a client whose life is ruined because of her actions.
Dorothy is the conscience of the group and dislikes the recklessness of Ramona and some of the other girls she’s brought into the fold, so she turns witness against Ramona when they are all captured by the police.
The early scenes in the club and as Ramona and Dorothy’s friendship develops are touching and sweet. Where the film goes awry for me, was the ongoing scenes of fleecing the men. In my estimate a good half-hour could have been cut from the film and the story would have been crisp and engaging. I didn’t think Annabelle’s characteristic of throwing up at almost anything added to the film, and somehow I got the feeling this was a Will Ferrell (as producer) sort of flourish. The way this film unfolded, I kept wondering why I had to watch all this, to get to a conclusion.
Wu was excellent. I thought her portrayal of being unsure on the inside while giving the illusion of being strong and OK was well done. Lopez did a wonderful job of being the streetwise aging stripper that knew how to navigate the world of clubs and men to get what she wanted. Stiles was good as the interviewer. Palmer and Reinhart were very good as the two who rounded out this racially mixed foursome. However, as previously stated the Reinhart’s throwing up on a moments noticed, seem like it was an unneeded add-on to the character. Ho was wonderful as Dorothy’s grandmother and during the scene at Christmas, when they were telling stories, she stood out. Lorene Scafaria wrote and directed this film. I really think she wasn’t clear enough in the intent to tell a crisp good story. Some of the visual scenes, especially in the strip club, were really well shot and give the sense that you were there.
Overall: This could have been a much better film if it reflected the speed and intent of the first fifteen to twenty minutes.