Review of Girls` Night

Introduction

Girls’ Night is a made for TV movie and stars Julie Walters and Brenda Blethyn as best friends Jackie and Dawn. They’re a couple of Northern lasses working at a circuit board factory who win big at the local Bingo hall. The good luck doesn’t last long however as Dawn is not well and realises that she doesn’t have long to live so off they set for Las Vegas where they meet all round cowboy Cody, played by Kris Kristofferson. In true Thelma and Louise stylee (less the killing and police etc) the girls set out to make the most of what will likely be their last trip together.

Video

The disc presents a mediocore non-anamorphic 15:9 ratio transfer. It’s the background that let’s the picture down. Whilst the part of the scene that is in focus is fine the rest isn’t just blurred but quite grainy as well.

Audio

The audio track is Dolby Surround but there’s little evidence of it due to this movie being largely about dialogue. Any opportunites for decent surround are basically sounds panning from left to right and pretty shallow with the sound stage being extremely narrow and strongly biased to the centre speaker.

Features

Surprisingly for a TV movie you actually get some extras on this disc. These comprise of a trailer, 10 minutes of cast/crew interviews and 4 minutes of on location footage. Whilst not mind blowing it’s nice to see some extra effort has gone into this disc.

Conclusion

One of the problems with this movie is that it’s so formulaic, it holds absolutely no surprises whatsoever and has all been done many times before with the only slight variation being that the actual trip to Las Vegas is kind of secondary to the main plot. Another problem with this movie is it’s basically emotional mush that doesn’t really have allot to say about anything. As such it makes it more for the ladies out there (apologies if that sounds sexist), the sort of movie they’d sit in front of the TV watching accompanied with a box of tissues. Lastly it’s not really funny at all, well there wasn’t any humour that made me even lift an eyebrow although it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Julie Walters and Brenda Blethyn are placed in exactly the kind of roles they’ve played numerous times. This isn’t to mean they are at all stale as they are both excellent, it’s more of a testament to good casting I suppose. On the casting front I couldn’t grasp why Kris Kristofferson was there apart from to lend another known name to the film.

So not a great quality DVD of a made for TV movie that’s best left for a “Girls’ Night” and not really one for the males.