Rushon and the learned relationship counselor dwelling in his underpants agree: Seven weeks of patiently wooing the lovely but demure Nikki have earned the man a little something more than a chaste goodnight kiss. “By now I’d have her ass bouncin’ like a lowrider in a Dr. Dre video,” snorts Bunz, Rushon’s main man and self-styled “playa.” Thus, a manly pact is struck; before sunrise, both guys will be knockin’ boots with the ladies they’re double-dating that night. Bunz (the eerily Wayansesque TV sitcom star Foxx) actually faces the longest odds. His blind date, Lysterine (Fox), pegs him right away as a no-class “ghetto rat” and nearly bolts before they’re even introduced. But as the evening progresses, things heat up with both couples, and the promised land is soon in reach of Bunz and Rushon, provided they can score the latex protection their safe sex-conscious dates require. So begins a night of shamelessly raunchy, phallocentric comedy as the two Sons of Priapus make repeated runs to the corner market – the lambskin condoms they got the first time won’t block HIV, and sheets of (aptly named) Glad Wrap are needed as dental dams – while staving off death from backed-up bodily fluids. This is, as you might imagine, humor that targets a viewer’s inner junior-high boy who still sniggers at allusions to sex as “ridin’ the baloney pony.” Representative gags hinge upon leg-humping dogs, the amusing accents of foreign grocery cashiers, and mistaken identity in a testicular surgery ward. So – is it too late to convince you this is often a very funny movie that, while hardly a must-see, is far better than its knuckleheaded trailers suggest? Within the context of films that include the word booty in their titles, it serves up an unusually fresh, inventive and good-natured brew of pure lascivious fun. The actors are warm, engaging, and somehow able to convey the unspoken message: “It’s okay to laugh at this shit; you’re still a good person.” Booty Call is also more woman-friendly than most of its ilk in the sense that blatant sexual objectification is taken as a given, and the females are every bit as randy as, if more prudent than, the guys. So if you have a soft or hard spot for this kind of thing, give your superego a day off and enjoy a quintessential guilty-pleasure spring comedy.
This article appears in May 24 • 2002.