The plot is simple: two white women (Goldie Hawn and Amy Schumer, our wacky mother-daughter duo) go on a package holiday to Ecuador, where they are snatched (get it?) by a band of brown-skinned thugs. They end up marooned on the Amazon. It’s a “comedy”. Hawn, who hasn’t appeared in a movie since 2002’s The Banger Sisters, came back for this?
“We’re gonna put the fun in non-refundable!” Schumer’s Emily insists. Sadly, there’s very little fun to be found. For a film that tries to assert its girl-power position by way of endless, increasingly crude jokes, it comes down surprisingly hard on its female characters’ bodies and sex lives. Emily’s American ignorance is acknowledged and excused; she’s “never voted” and doesn’t “speak Spanish”. At least she’s not racist, the film assures us, by having an Asian boyfriend dump her in one of the film’s early scenes. Odd then, that the body count of South Americans she’s killed remains high-volume and insistently low-stakes.
Written by Katie Dippold, who wrote lady comedies The Heat and Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters reboot, and directed by Jonathan Levine, who made the comparatively charming 50/50, its enjoyment hangs on the viewer’s tolerance for Schumer. Those who are into her boozy, bawdy, bodily function-heavy humour might be able to stomach this. Others, like me, might find Schumer’s gap yah movie difficult to digest.
