`Bad Girls' a Western with style but no surprises

By Sean Cole

JAKARTA (JP): Is it worth seeing? Well, that may depend on what you're in it for. If you're in it for the action, fast paced shoot-outs, slow motion ride-outs, dramatic music, a lot of conflict and even more cleavage, then you're in luck. If you are in it for originality, depth, scope, and emotional or intellectual stimulation, then you may be quite left out.

Essentially, Bad Girls is a Western-style Thelma and Louise with twice the women and half the substance. It is almost surprising how much the plots, and other elements, of these two movies parallel each other.

Bad Girls revolves around four plucky, attractive, strong- willed prostitutes working and living in a brothel in the old west. The opening sequence of the film probably bears, or rather bore, the name of the town, the year and perhaps some other information flashed at the bottom center of the screen. But, as this caption was blocked out by black marker sometime during the exportation of the film, we are not able to find out where we are, when this is or why we aren't allowed to know.

The film begins with Nita (Mary Stuart Masterson) being attacked by a drunk and boisterous colonel on the balcony of the brothel/saloon, while a group of Christians protest "drinkin', gamblin' and whorin'" outside. Cody (Madeline Stowe), the leader of the four women, threatens to kill the colonel if he touches Nita again. He pulls out a gun and begins expertly shooting glasses off of the bar. She pulls out a gun and kills him. We then hear the immortal words, "The whore shot the colonel! Get her!" and Cody is brought to the gallows.

The town preacher, the leader of the protest, who up until now has been giving a rather forced and erratic, even embarrassing, speech of the evils of prostitution, continues to orate as Cody sits, with her hands bound, atop a horse.

For some reason, the preacher does not say a word about the fact that she has just shot the colonel and seems to be sentencing her to death for selling her body: something she has most likely been doing in the same town for years. It is not that we love to hate the preacher as a character, but that the actor playing him does not do an even halfway believable job.

Finally, the three other women, Lilly (Drew Barrymore), Eileen (Andie MacDowell) and Nita, ride, in slow motion, to Cody's rescue by charging their horses through the execution crowd and the preacher is, thankfully, trampled. The women escape and, like Thelma and Louise, are on the run from the law and Cody's past, for the rest of the film. Basically, it is one capture and subsequent rescue after another.

They head for Oregon to "make a new start". Like Thelma and Louise, Cody, Lilly, Nita and Eileen are self-sufficient, independent, defiant and handy with a gun. They drink, they smoke, they do strenuous labor and will not let anyone stand in their way.

Inconsistencies

What Bad Girls doesn't have that Thelma and Louise does is integrity, cohesive structure and clarity of purpose.

In an interview with Premiere magazine's Martha Southgate, director Jonathan Kaplan and executive producer Linda Obst summarize the objective of the film.

"What the movie's really about," says Kaplan, "is four women who don't rely on men -- they protect each other and rescue and provide for each other." Obst continues, "We wanted to see women as heroes -- 'We can do this; we don't have to throw our hands up in despair and lose the gun.'"

It is true that the four women of Bad Girls are self-reliant and never surrender without a fight. However, if the point of the movie is to show that four heroines can fare as well in the wild west as the standard males of Young Guns or The Outlaw (which Dermont Mulrooney also co-stars in) then there are some inconsistencies.

For a film that is supposed to promote the idea of women as more than an extension of the needs and desires of men, there is an awful lot of female objectification. Even when there is no reason for cleavage, it rears it audience-drawing head.

But the long and the short of it is that Bad Girls seems to have moved half-way toward a goal that has already been fully realized by films made years ago. We have seen much more engaging and realistic self reliant women in the past and we do not need to see a film with that as its sole engine again. As the other love interest, William, says toward the beginning of the film, "Yeah, I heard you twice the first time."