Cast: Jamie Foxx, Tommy Davidson, Vivica Fox, Tamala Jones, Art Malik, Scott LaRose, Gedde
Watanabe
Director: Jeff Pollack
Producer: John Morrissey
Screenplay: Takashi Bufford, Bootsie
Cinematography: Ron Orieux
Music: Robert Folk
U.S. Distributor: Columbia Pictures
Booty Call is an unapologetic celebration of bad taste and vulgarity, proceeding much farther down paths only briefly explored by films like Dumb and Dumber and Kingpin. And, at the risk of forever corrupting my reputation as an "intellectual", I have to admit that I found elements of this movie to be extremely funny. Booty Call isn't a source of nonstop laughs, and there are a lot of gags that fall flat, but, on those sporadic occasions when something works, the result can be hilarious.
Champions of political correctness will be horrified by this film, which contains something guaranteed to offend just about everyone. Racial stereotypes abound, in particular as they apply to an effeminate Chinese waiter and a pair of Indian convenience store owners. The film also exhibits clear homophobic tendencies. Sex is referred to using a wide variety of euphemisms, some of which are clever and many of which are quite graphic. Finally, there's a scene with a dog under a table that I won't describe in greater detail. Suffice it to say that it's simultaneously sick, slick, and funny.
There's not much to the plot, which could be described as a '90s version of After Hours, although the writing certainly isn't as crisp. Booty Call is basically about two guys' ongoing struggle to "get down" with their dates. The problem is, while everyone has the same goal, the girls insist on safe sex while the men would rather ignore the "safe" part. Eventually, our intrepid heroes, Bunz (Jamie Foxx) and Rushon (Tommy Davidson), are making 2 AM runs to a convenience store, looking for condoms and cellophane wrap. Before the night is over, they end up chasing a dog, foiling a robbery, hijacking a cab, and delivering a baby. Essentially, Booty Call is a loosely-connected series of skits of varying quality.
Foxx and Davidson make an appealing pair, the latter playing his role with admirable restraint while the former lets it all hang out. They're matched with Vivica Fox and Tamala Jones, respectively, who, while not as adept at comedy as their male co-stars, are good enough "straight men" to compliment Foxx and Davidson. There's chemistry among these four, and we get the sense that they had even more fun making the movie than we're having watching it.
In a way, I admire films that push the envelope. This is the sort of thing that Monty
Python used to do. No, the British troupe wasn't always this crude, but they constantly
challenged morals and conventions, and, in their own way, that's what the makers of Booty
Call are doing. Going in, I didn't expect much from this film, so I was pleasantly surprised by
the result. Booty Call isn't any kind of a classic -- comic or otherwise -- but it's
unpretentious and energetic, and, if you're on the lookout for eighty minutes of in-your-face,
uncouth humor, you could easily do worse.
© 1997 James Berardinelli