Rough Night 
 
 We gave it a C+ 
 
 To paraphrase Mel Brooks, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is the second time the dead stripper in penis sunglasses falls off a Jet Ski.” Or maybe it’s just Rough Night, a raunchy, wildly off-the-rails farce from the team that more or less brought you Broad City. 
 
 Scarlett Johansson is Jess, a 30ish Senate candidate who can barely spare a minute to sit down for Seamless with her fiancé (Paul W. Downs, also a co-writer), let alone celebrate their upcoming union. Her college roommate Alice (Jillian Bell) is the one who insists on reuniting the old crew for an elaborate bachelorette weekend in Miami — including freelance radical Frankie (Ilana Glazer) and Blair (Zoë Kravitz), now a sleek corporate type — even if their paths have diverged since their dorm-room days of midnight Doritos and beer pong. (The arrival of Jess’ Australian year-abroad friend Pippa, played with cracked New Age glee by Kate McKinnon, is a cross she’ll have to bear.) 
 
 Somewhere between the cocaine, the Weenie Linguine, and the Craigslist gigolo, things somehow begin to go wrong. Director Lucia Aniello stacks her loose cannon of a script with a few truly great bits and some inspired casting — including Ty Burrell and Demi Moore as a pair of predatory, praline-colored swingers — but then never quite trusts their gifts, blowing out her Girls Just Wanna Have Hangovers conceit until it feels like the summer-movie equivalent of a fidget spinner: shiny, manic, and spiraling to nowhere. C+ ||||| “Rough Night,” a bachelorette-party-from-hell thriller comedy that’s got some push and some laughs, despite its essentially formulaic nature, is a perfect example of why Hollywood needs (many) more women filmmakers. Do we want to see more women directors who have the scalding audacity of a Kathryn Bigelow, or who can turn a tent-pole origin story like “Wonder Woman” into a cultural event the way Patty Jenkins did? Duh and duh. That said, we also need more women to direct the MOR entertainment of the week. In the case of a goofy-nasty bad-behavior farce like “Rough Night,” directed and co-written by Lucia Aniello, what’s novel isn’t so much the plot as the spin, the female gaze, the inside-the-club sensibility. That, for all the cookie-cutter elements, is what’s fresh about the movie, and why it should find a solid audience. 
 
 But first, a word on how derivative it is. In “Rough Night,” four college chums reunite for a weekend trip to Miami, where they’ve borrowed a splendid beach house to hold a bachelorette bash for Jess (Scarlett Johansson). A decade ago, they were frat-house-party hellions who could guzzle their way through a night of beer pong. But they’ve grown up — sort of. Jess, now with clipped conservative hair, is running for state senator, and she and her fiancée, Peter (Paul W. Downs), are so respectable and adult that they’re already like an old married couple, too bone-weary for sex. Frankie (Ilana Glazer), a lesbian and full-time activist, organizes protests faster than she can get people to show up for them, and Blair (Zoë Kravitz), who is Frankie’s former lover, is in the thick of a divorce and child-custody battle. Then there’s Alice (Jillian Bell), the exception who proves the rule — which is to say, she’s still every bit the needy, arrested drunk-girl narcissist she was in college. 
 
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 The four go out to a club, where they do endless shots and too much cocaine, and they’re introduced to Jess’ outside BFF, an Aussie free spirit named Pippa (Kate McKinnon of “Saturday Night Live”). Then they go back to the house, where the requisite male stripper has been put on order. A dude shows up at the door (he’s sexy, but seems a little too threatening to be a stripper), and moments later, after push quite literally comes to shove, he’s lying on the floor, a pool of blood spreading beneath him. It’s a complete accident, but he is dead. 
 
 Ninety-nine percent of the people who see “Rough Night” will have no idea that it lifts its premise, and much of its flavor, from an edgy and overlooked 1998 movie called “Very Bad Things,” which starred Christian Slater and was Peter Berg’s first film as a director. It was about a group of guys who accidentally kill a prostitute during a bachelor party in Vegas; what they do to hide the disaster is hideous but — as Berg staged it — creepily plausible, and the film, though it never caught on, had a queasy power as a foray into the dark side of the male psyche. “Rough Night” is a lighter entertainment. It’s “Very Bad Things” with the sexes reversed, but also with a harmless synthetic dollop of the “Hangover” films, a replay of the best-friend-of-the-bride jealousy drama of “Bridesmaids,” plus a touch of “Weekend at Bernie’s.” It’s all been mashed together in the comedy compactor, yet the best thing about “Rough Night” is the feisty, claws-out spontaneity of its competitive banter between “sisters” who love and hate each other. 
 
 Lucia Aniello and her co-writer, Paul W. Downs, are two of the forces behind the web-gone-Comedy Central series “Broad City” (which was co-created by Glazer), but this movie is a lot broader. It’s farcical, situational, and over-the-top, yet it gives the actresses room to maneuver. Johansson, who got swallowed up in the “Blade-Runner”-meets-broken-glass cyber doldrums of “Ghost in the Shell,” has long avoided this sort of unabashed megaplex comedy, but it’s a pleasure to see her take on a role in which she can coast along on the no-nonsense vibrance of her personality. She makes Jess cautious but fast — a grown-up trying to let loose even as she keeps her inner desperado in check. Glazer, likewise, creates a lived-in character: a social justice warrior who is spoiled and annoying enough to cue us to the fact that her stridency is compensating for something. 
 
 It’s Jillian Bell who’s the film’s comic spark plug. Her Alice, as scripted, may seem like a walking “loser,” but Bell has the kind of hostile crack timing that Kathryn Hahn did in “Bad Moms.” When she gets a line like “I can’t just go to jail! I couldn’t even make it through the first episode of ‘Orange Is the New Black,'” she delivers it with dramatic sincerity, digging into the character’s anxiety, and her one-way duel with Pippa says much about the possessiveness of friendship. When Alice glares at her rival, her dark-saucer eyes gleam with a hilariously paranoid desperation that’s almost touching. 
 
 What do these five characters do with a corpse on their hands? They figure out ways to get rid of it. They debate the issue of whether they’re guilty of involuntary manslaughter (as long as the body just lies there, no; as soon as they make the mistake of moving it, maybe yes). And when they learn that the wealthy swingers next door, played with a bit too much on-the-nose hambone smarminess by Demi Moore and Ty Burrell, have surveillance cameras that may have recorded their cover-up scheme, they send Blair over to the house to sleep with the couple — a twist that would have worked better if Zoë Kravitz had more of a comic angle to play. 
 
 There are plenty of gags in “Rough Night” that don’t work, like the overly obvious role-reversal stunt of having Jess’ fiancée stage a bachelor party that’s an absurdly effete evening of wine-tasting. McKinnon, as Pippa, has an effervescent silliness, but too much of the joke of her performance boils down to her doing an Aussie accent as if that were a bubbly novelty. Yet Peter’s all-night-long drive to Miami to rescue Jess gets funnier as it goes along, and what’s amusing about the movie is the cocky texture of its feminine bonding — the jokes about home bikini waxing or scarfing pizza over a dead body, delivered with a new style of merciless aggression. It’s hardly the first, or most original, comedy of female outrage to come along, but we’ve had 40 years of men behaving badly on screen, stretching back to “National Lampoon’s Animal House,” and watching these ladies get their turn generates a slobby low-down kick. ||||| It’s hard enough being a woman filmmaker these days, but consider the plight of the woman filmgoer. It took years to get a big-budget Wonder Woman vehicle, and if you really must have role models in your movies, she’s probably not a bad one. But comedies in which women behave really badly—like 2016’s Bad Moms or Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie, or the more recent Snatched—have become the happy-hour cosmo of moviegoing. They’re plentiful, and supposedly just the ticket for women looking for a “girls’ night out” picture, just something fun to see for kicks. But if they’re supposed to be just a diversion, why—one after another—do they torture us with so many questions? Am I supposed to like this? Is this supposed to be funny? Does this really represent what Hollywood thinks most—or even just many or some—women really want from big-screen entertainment? 
 
 Rough Night, directed and co-written by Lucia Aniello—who has also written and directed numerous episodes of Broad City—is the latest entry in the “women whooping it up” genre, and it doesn’t make any of the above questions easier to answer. The movie—co-written by Paul Downs, Aniello’s boyfriend and writing partner, who also appears in the picture—is at its best when it catches the precise crosscurrent between sleazy and breezy. Scarlett Johansson is Jess, who’s launching a bid for state senator—she’s also about to be married, an adventure that just might be scarier than running for public office. Her old college clique—hoity-toity real-estate diva Blair (Zoë Kravitz), kooky activist Frankie (Ilana Glazer, of Broad City) and randy, insecure teacher Alice (Jillian Bell)—are spiriting her off to Miami for one last bachelorette weekend. They don’t know that she has also invited Pippa (Kate MacKinnon), a college friend they don’t know—Jess met her while spending a year abroad. Pippa is Australian, a loopy good-time girl with an Earth-mother streak, and her accent is a wild ocean of exaggerated rolling vowels. She barges into the movie in an assortment of tropical-printed rompers and maxi dresses, and she gets the movie’s best lines—or maybe she only makes them the best, unreeling them like crazy-colored party streamers. 
 
 The opening third of Rough Night is the best part of the movie and also the most predictable: The women get to Miami and commence partying, hard, immediately. Why is it funny when Frankie scores some coke and the women, at first reluctant to partake (one of them is running for public office, after all), end up descending upon it like gulls fighting for a scrap of fruit on a beach? Somehow the loose, coarse nuttiness of it works. There are props, including funny glasses with a fake penis where the nose should be. There’s a male stripper—make that two male strippers, at least in the literal sense that two brawny guys end up stripping down. But when the movie takes a sort-of dark turn into black-comedy territory, it starts to fall apart. The new, supposedly outrageous scenarios just aren’t as funny as the stock women-gone-wild gags. Ty Burrell and Demi Moore show up in tiny roles, as a kinky, predatory couple, but their oily come-ons are more limp than they are slippery. 
 
 The idea behind Rough Night isn’t bad by itself, and it’s fun to watch Johansson cutting loose in a comedy for a change. The picture also offers a few sight gags that are pure, dumb genius: they just work. (The sight of Downs, as Jess’ fiance, gingerly and acrobatically polishing the windshield of an eighteen-wheeler—did I mention he’s wearing a diaper?—isn’t something you’re likely to forget soon.) But Rough Night tries hard to capture the pleasurably profane, uncorked spirit of Broad City and doesn’t quite succeed, maybe because the joys of the show lie in how casual and intimate it is. Its glimpses into believable neurotic behavior among women are larkish and offhand—but blown up for the big screen, they’re not quite enough to fill it. I laughed a few times at Rough Night, often at MacKinnon and at least once at Downs in his diaper. And really, as Hangover-style dumb entertainments go, it’s certainly good enough. Which isn’t to say it’s anything close to what what women want. ||||| The only thing memorable about Sex and the City 2 is the number two part, which describes it totally, if you get my drift. Everything else in this deadly, brainless exercise in pointless tedium is dedicated to the screeching audacity of delusional self-importance that convinces these people the whole world is waiting desperately to watch two hours and 25 minutes of platform heels, fake orgasms and preposterous clothes. It is to movies what fried dough is to nutrition. 
 
 It has been two years since their last chick flick and in the interim, Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda have turned from Cosmo girls who munch into cougar ladies who lunch. They still devote their lives to the credo that no crisis is ever so great that it can’t be solved by a new pair of Manolo Blahniks, but now there’s a difference. No longer waiting for orgasms, they’re waiting for menopause, and in all four cases, they’ve found it. No film has ever contained so many sloppy hairdos soaking wet from hot flashes. Tired of being called the heterosexual equivalent of Armistead Maupin’s gay West Coast lampoon Tales of the City in the San Francisco Chronicle, this installment opens with Carrie in a man’s tuxedo, playing the best man at a gay wedding almost as vulgar as the homophobic one-liners about the minister, played by-are you ready?-Liza Minnelli, who parodies herself by telling the congregation, “Marriage is serious … or so they tell me,” before blasting off with Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).” 
 
 Carrie, a neurotic Black Belt shopper who lives for designer labels, and an occasional columnist who writes about being fabulous and single, has been married two years to Mr. Big (Chris Noth), who once dumped her at the altar. (Sarah Jessica Parker looks better after her face mole was surgically removed, so why does her hair look like 20 pounds of mattress stuffing?) Uptight, Waspy-turned-Jewess Charlotte (Kristin Davis) brings her bald Jewish husband, her two babies and a nanny without a bra. Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) is back with nice-guy bartender Steve (David Eigenberg), but still too preoccupied as a lawyer to pay much attention to her home life (although rarely seen so much as filing a brief). Samantha (Kim Cattrall), still the group slut who has slept with every eligible man in Manhattan and half of Brooklyn without learning anything about real life in the Porthault sheets, brings a new face that looks like some of the sutures are still in it and her usual stinging one-liners. (“It’s a gay wedding-what’s one more bitch with an attitude?”) These are the jokes, and since the four women dress like drag queens, it’s not always easy to tell the difference. 
 
 Substituting for a plot, the four bimbos brew trouble in paradise. Allergic to the kitchen, Carrie calls herself “more Coco Chanel than coq au vin” and wants to go out on the town every night, while Big pleads for osso buco at home and watching old black-and-white classics in bed like It Happened One Night. (The only sane person in the entire film, if you ask me.) Smith (Jason Lewis), the old squeeze Samantha turned into a Hollywood star by smearing sushi on her V-word, comes to town for his new movie premiere and puts a temporary smile on her face, although it sags again when Miley Cyrus shows up on the red carpet wearing the same dress. (Penélope Cruz also makes a cameo appearance as the senior VP of the Bank of Madrid. Who could make this stuff up?) You keep asking yourself, “Where is this going?” And the only answer you come up with is “Every place it’s already been before.” In the 2008 chapter, Carrie had a nervous breakdown in a Vivienne Westwood wedding gown that looked like a cloud of lemon meringue pie on the front steps of the New York Public Library, and her soulmates whisked her off to Mexico for mariachis, margaritas and a dose of Montezuma’s Revenge for Charlotte, who pooped in her lingerie. This time, after Mr. Big suggests two days a week off from marriage, they all drag Carrie to Abu Dhabi (played by Morocco), where more than an hour is wasted on camel rides, karaoke numbers and insulting Middle East jokes like “Abu Dhabi Doo,” “Bedouin, Bath and Beyond” and “Lawrence of My Labia.” A mild touch of feminism makes a brief appearance when a group of women covered in black confess they’ve been inspired by a forbidden book by their idol … Suzanne Somers!! Samantha gets arrested for nudity and kissing in public; Carrie loses her passport in the casbah; and they almost miss their return flight, which elicits from Samantha a mournful shriek: “I can’t be in menopause and coach!” 
 
 Dragging its deplorable carcass into infinity, Sex and the City 2 is so bad you can’t even watch the trailer. Almost everyone who has ever appeared on the TV series reappears to mutter two or three lines that contribute nothing to the film they’re in. The women-too old now to pout, whine and babble about their wet dreams, affluent and successful for reasons that are never clear-are all vain, narcissistic, selfish, superficial and really rather stupid. The actors work hard to perform triage, but they’ve been playing these roles so long they’ve grown moss. The insipid screenplay and catatonic direction seem chloroformed. Both are by Michael Patrick King. He’s an expert at product placement and marketing (the end credits list hundreds of free plugs for everything from limousines to breakfast cereal), but I seriously doubt if he could direct Jeeps in the middle of the Mojave desert. 
 
 When all this greed pays off with millions in box office receipts, the hacks responsible for Sex and the City 2 will say, “I told you so.” But that won’t make the movie any better. You can’t make caviar out of jujubes. 
 
 rreed@observer.com 
 
 Sex and the City 2 
 
 Running time 146 minutes 
 
 Written and directed by Michael Patrick King 
 
 Starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis, Chris Noth 
 
 
 
 1 Eyeball out of 4 
 
 
 
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– A mostly female cast gathers for director Lucia Aniello's Rough Night, which reveals just how bad a bachelorette weekend with college friends can get, especially when male strippers are involved. If this plot seems a bit tired to you, you're not alone. The movie has a lackluster approval rating of about 50% among critics on Rotten Tomatoes, despite big-name stars such as Scarlett Johannson and Kate McKinnon. Samples: Rough Night "offers a few sight gags that are pure, dumb genius" and "is at its best when it catches the precise crosscurrent between sleazy and breezy." But when the movie takes a dark turn, "it starts to fall apart," Stephanie Zacharek writes at Time. "As Hangover-style dumb entertainments go, it's certainly good enough," she adds, but she isn't sure this is "anything close" to what women want to see. Owen Gleiberman, on the other hand, says Rough Night is "a perfect example of why Hollywood needs (many) more women filmmakers." Though its formula is quite "derivative," its female perspective makes it fresh, he writes at Variety. The best elements: "the feisty, claws-out spontaneity of its competitive banter between 'sisters' who love and hate each other" and Jillian Bell, "the film's comic spark plug." Leah Greenblatt was less tickled. Rough Night is "a raunchy, wildly off-the-rails farce" that "feels like the summer-movie equivalent of a fidget spinner: shiny, manic, and spiraling to nowhere," she writes at Entertainment Weekly. She does commend the casting—naming Ty Burrell and Demi Moore, who play a swingers couple—but adds the actors have to deal with a "loose cannon of a script." "Well, at least they got the title right," begins Adam Graham at the Detroit News. The rest of his review is no less harsh. "Rough Night is a dismal, excruciating experience, a tired retread of raunchy comedy tropes that can't be bothered to come up with any funny or original bits," he writes. Like one of its characters on cocaine, "it's frantic, scattered and convinced of its own greatness," then "empty and rather sad."