Pretty bad

“Bad Girls” is a gender-flipped “Young Guns” that can’t even produce the silly, made-for-MTV thrills of that movie, much less some of the better ones in the genre like “Tombstone” and “Unforgiven”. It stars four highly likable and totally game actresses but the film is such a dud that they can only have our sympathy.


Madeleine Stowe, Andie MacDowell, Drew Barrymore, and Mary Stuart Masterson play Cody, Eileen, Lilly, and Anita, four prostitutes in one of those Western towns with a hopping whorehouse and a preacher just outside leading a congregation against it. Stowe winds up killing a man bothering one of the other girls, and rather than see her hang, they help her escape and go on the run, chased by Pinkerton Detectives.


You know something is really off when the very next scene after this big escape is to see all four women frolicking naked in a pond. Scratch that! Something is even more off if the filmmakers are so afraid that your four leads won’t look rough and tumble enough that in one scene, they all seem to have this one smear of dirt on their face that looks like it was applied on like mascara. For whores in the old west, these ladies all look way more than modestly well-preserved and the dresses they wear look pretty high class as well.


But the bigger problem is the actresses filling out these scenes look as lifeless as they do Hollywood chic. There’s no real personality there- from this movie’s perspective the only things that matter are can these four feisty women shoot, ride, and handle themselves against men, and can they look beguilingly flirty enough in the downtime? What makes it worse is that we’ve seen so many movies about how meek and desperate prostitutes were in the old West- if they were so good at doing all these other things, would being prostitutes still make sense? Not only that but it comes to our attention that one of them is actually fairly well-off money-wise and another one may have access to a ranch house owned by her husband. Huh? It seems like these women only do prostitution for fun.

Much of it is lazy but Stowe tries to give it some toughness, Barrymore tries to give it sex appeal even though she comes off like the biggest cosplayer among them, and Masterson and MacDowell are wasted. What passes for plot is that the bad girls meet two guys (Dermot Mulroney, James Legros) who might make romantic suitors (though, not interesting ones), and Stowe meets an old bandit (James Russo) from her past who gives her some trouble.


There are a few nice ideas here like the bad girls teaming up to rob the bandits who robbed them and you wish it did more with the idea of women being denied land ownership but the few action scenes are poorly edited and done with obnoxious slo-mo and the script continues to be nothing but an on auto-pilot bore. By the time we get to the final showdown the movie hasn’t even done much to prove to us these women are believable gunslingers. Scratch that! They barely even come off as people. What a waste!