Hollywood's highest profile feminist gets smacked around by film critics for some surprising reasons.
It isn’t easy being a woke celebrity. You try. And you try. Yet it’s never good enough.
Katy Perry attempts to turn her grrrl power shtick into a political movement and gets popped by a withering op-ed in The Daily Beast.
Will Ferrell does everything humanly possible to support progressive causes. What happens next? he gets dubbed a racist for a comedy co-starring a black superstar.
And now there’s Amy Schumer’s Snatched.
The new comedy stars the uber-progressive comic and Goldie Hawn in a mother-daughter adventure. Schumer’s influence on the film is palpable. She didn’t just famously nix a gun-laden sequence (she’s for gun control in real life). The screenplay also has her fingerprints all over it.
Her character notices, and mocks, how a tribal family in Colombia treats women like second-class citizens. There’s plenty of female empowerment chatter through and through. And it’s the women who must save themselves.
It wasn’t enough, apparently.
Here’s The New York Times “destroying” the film’s lack of insensitivity.
Snatched is one of those movies that subscribes to a dubious homeopathic theory of cultural insensitivity by which the acknowledgment of offensiveness is supposed to prevent anyone from taking offense. The idea is that if you use variations on the phrase “That’s racist!” as a punch line a few times, nothing else you say or do could possibly be racist. Including, say, populating your movie with dark-skinned thugs with funny accents and killing a few of them for cheap laughs.
TheWrap.com hints at outrage but doesn’t go the full scold:
The trip is a trap, however, and the women are summarily kidnapped, thrown into a dingy cell, and held for ransom by a ruthless sort named Morgado (Oscar Jaenada), who — if we’re keeping tabs on Hollywood’s representation of foreign lands — is the first native character, and one of the only ones, with more than three lines.
The Hollywood Reporter hits harder:
There’s one extremely bizarre gag involving the manual extraction of a tapeworm, and also some unfortunate cultural stereotyping in the form of gun-toting Colombians with long hair and sinister teeth….
[Director Jonathan] Levine … isn’t a deft enough director to overcome the optics of yet another film about white characters finding themselves thanks to their experience in a problem-plagued developing country.
The Village Voice shares its outrage in the headline: Snatched Is Perfect for Mother’s Day if Mom Hates and Fears Other Countries
In a scene that signals the soft racism to follow, Linda mishears the standard English greeting of the Ecuadorian concierge, handing out a complimentary drink, as “whale cum.”
Then, the reviewer goes for the jugular by comparing the film to Monster in Law.
That film traded in casual misogyny, Snatched in offhand xenophobia. Happy Mother’s Day.
Sorry, Schumer. All of your liberal virtue signaling isn’t enough. Your new film simply isn’t woke. And today’s film critics, who increasingly resemble Social Justice Warriors, are all too eager to say so.
[Cross-posted from Hollywood in Toto.]
