I didn’t expect much from this movie going into it, and I was not wrong. I will say it now, skip this movie because there is nothing that saves it, not even the fan service.
My biggest problem with this film is the narration. I hate narration in any form because of how lazy it is. Narration, in my opinion, is an easy cop out to sound deep. It is a device used by filmmakers when they do not have faith in their audience to come up with their own conclusions. Therefore, narration is used as a way to railroad the audience into having a certain opinion of the film. In this movie’s case, it was to hammer in some form of sympathy for the strippers. The narration itself is boring, it lacks any emotion and it feels as if Constance Wu is reading outload. Why should I care if the person telling the story doesn’t. Wu is also an unreliable narrator. What she says, how she says it, and the actual events suggest that her story isn’t the whole story. You will be stuck listening to a story that doesn’t matter.
There isn’t enough story in this plot to flesh out a full movie. As a result, this movie has a lot of unnecessary padding. These include pointless cameos, comic relief characters serving their purpose, there is even a scene where they open Christmas presents. They try incredibly hard to make you empathize with the strippers, but it is hard to do when they are screwing over innocent people. Take out these scenes, and you have a far shorter yet equally uninteresting movie.
There is too much to say about this terrible movie. Do not watch this as there is no saving grace. Even the fan service that this movie provides, and it provides a small amount, doesn’t save this movie. It’s a movie with a bunch of poorly acted scenes stringed together with terrible narration. Spend your time elsewhere. If you are thinking about watching it for the fan service, don’t bother, just watch the scenes on youtube.