There have been enough movies about a character or group of characters traversing a city over the course of one night while an increasingly improbable series of inconvenient occurrences keep them from reaching some goal that it can probably be considered a comedic sub-genre at this point. Some of them, like Martin Scorsese’s After Hours or Chris Columbus’ Adventures in Babysitting, are very well liked. It’s safe to say that this latest entry in the sub-genre from writer/director Steven Brill, Walk of Shame, isn’t going to end up being part of the canon though. It’s terrible. Not just in a disappointing but inoffensive way either. Walk of Shame is sub-Date Night in quality, and is a complete waste of Elizabeth Banks in a lead role. Thinking about how this film comes from the same man who began his career as a director with the delightful Heavyweights is just heartbreaking. What was once such bright and shining potential has now been so long extinguished.
Banks’ character is an aspiring news reporter who’s hit a rough patch in both her personal life and career. In order to take her mind off of things, her friends take her out for a night of carousing, which winds up resulting in the shameful walk that the title refers to. You see, after waking from a one night stand, Banks’ character finds herself without her phone, money, or car, and living in a modern LA where anyone deprived of even one of those things would basically be as helpless as an infant. The journey part of the story begins when she finds out that she’s got to make it to an important job interview the next morning—a make or break moment for her—so she needs to somehow get across the city in her handicapped state. None of that is very important though. All you need to know is that Elizabeth Banks gets put in a tight yellow dress and is then thrown into a series of crazy situations.
As a concept, that’s not so bad, but in execution, it ends up being miserable. Walk of Shame just doesn’t work on any level. It’s broadly comedic, to the point of even being farcical, so you don’t ever believe in any of the characters as real people or care about whether or not they achieve their goals, but the real problem is that, for being so cartoony in tone, the film is weirdly devoid of jokes—and not just jokes that work. Jokes of any kind. Every once in a while there’s a half-offensive assertion that all women are whores or that all brown people are criminals, but that’s exactly what they are, assertions. The pseudo-racism and sexism doesn’t even get basic joke construction. Basically, the characters all run around a lot and yell their lines, so there seems to be an assumption that the audience is blindly going to laugh because they’ve been prompted to. Gillian Jacobs is kind of charming in a small role as one of the friends, and Lawrence Gilliard Jr, Alphonso McAuley, and Da’Vone McDonald seem like they could have been amusing as a trio of crack dealers if they were given more of a chance, but none of these people end up getting nearly enough of an opportunity to even remotely right this sinking ship. Walk of Shame is sunk, it’s covered in barnacles, and it’s probably haunted by a pirate ghost.
