White Chicks (2004): C-

You’d think the creepy masks worn by Shawn and Marlon Wayans – which look like Michael Myers with blond hair – would be the worst element of White Chicks. Unfortunately, you’d be wrong, since this undercover brothers comedy complements the awfulness of its protagonists’ Caucasian camouflage with putrid bathroom humor, pitiable romance and brainless racial/social commentary. It’s the last of these that’s most disappointing, since the film’s Soul Man-in-reverse premise – about two dark-skinned FBI agents (the Wayanses) who pose as the light-skinned Wilson heiresses in order to thwart a kidnapping scheme – seems tailor-made for a ribald critique of either black/white, or rich/poor, relations. Instead, however, the only thing the duo learns while encased in pasty female costumes is that women prefer their boyfriends to be sensitive listeners. The sole lesson viewers can take away from White Chicks – besides the fact that director Keenen Ivory Wayans’ I’m Gonna Git You Sucka satiric edge has completely disappeared – is that even suspensions of disbelief have limits, the insurmountable implausibility in this case being that no characters realize that the super-fashionable Wilson sisters have turned up in Hamptons high society with inhuman faces straight out of Rick Baker’s creature shop.