johnlink ranks WALK OF SHAME (2014)
Elizabeth Banks is one who usually improves anything she is in. This comedy, WALK OF SHAME, has been circulating HBO for the past month or so. Really didn’t know anything at all about it when I started it.
I watched WALK OF SHAME (2014) on 6.13.15. It was my first viewing of the film.
Meghan Miles (Elizabeth Banks) is a Los Angeles news anchor on a shortlist to be hired by a big network. She paints herself as the good girl: Engaged, likable, no skeletons in the closet. Coincidentally, she has a night where her fiancee leaves her and she discovers that she won’t be getting the new job. Her best friends (Gillian Jacobs and Sarah Wright) offer to take her out. Meghan drinks too much and ends up going home with a nice bartender (James Marsden).
Before the son comes up, she wakes up to a voicemail saying that she might have the job after all – that the other applicant had some online photos which made her not qualified – and that all Meghan has to do is get to work and take her new job. Thus begins the titular WALK OF SHAME which has everything go wrong that possibly could.
There is an appeal in making that one-bad-night movie. The story can be tight, the character can grow through their experience, and literally anything that a writer can concoct can happen. The top of the form is probably Scorsese’s AFTER HOURS. Alas, WALK OF SHAME is not at the top of the genre.
Elizabeth Banks gives it her all as her character goes through bad scenarios one-after-another. She has her car towed, ends up being solicited by a taxi driver for fare, stumbles into a crack house, assaults a religious man, steals a kid’s bike, and a bunch more. Soon the police are on to her as she is thought to be a prostitute thanks to the dress she wore to go out the evening before.
And that, it would seem, is the one major theme this movie wants to push: Just because a girl wears a revealing dress doesn’t make her a hooker. It’s a fair point, one which deserves to be made. But WALK OF SHAME, quite literally, makes this point a dozen times up to and including being the major focus of a climactic moment. It’s as if the movie theme gun only had one bullet in the chamber, so writer/director Steven Brill decided to make sure he got his money’s worth out of it.
Regardless of its thematic simplicity, this is a movie which has enough funny moments to make it watchable. Some of the characters encountered are funny, and those that aren’t don’t last long. WALK OF SHAME made me laugh a handful of times, but it isn’t memorable, I probably won’t ever see it again, and it really isn’t worth seeking out.
SCORES
FILM: 3; MOVIE: 6; ACTING: 5; WRITING: 4
3+6+5+4+0=18
FINAL SCORE: 4.5 out of 10
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