Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Queens on the Run’ on Netflix, a Wheezy Road-Trip Comedy From Mexico

The wake trailing behind Girls Trip continues to turn up copycat comedies, case in point, Mexican yukfest Queens on the Run (now on Netflix), which deposits four longtime ladyfriends in a classic car for a road trip potholed with hijinks, mishaps, misunderstandings and miscellaneous zainesses. Martha Higareda – who some of us might recognize from sci-fi series Altered Carbon and the hands-down best episode of Into the Dark, Culture Shock – is most notable among the cast, and she also penned the screenplay, which has us wondering if being in front of the camera is more her forte.   

QUEENS ON THE RUN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: A vintage red convertible barrels down the road with four women inside, and there are bad guys in another car, and there’s a chicken, and the tone of the scene is clear: hysteria. Pandemonium. Things are outta control. “Give me back my mom!” one of the women screams. But this is a scene from the middle of the movie, extracted and dropped at the beginning to theoretically hook us, a strategy I question, considering how obnoxious it is. And so we jump back a few days so we can meet the principals: Marilu (Alejandra Ambrosi), a suburban mom dealing with the frantic bustle of a weekday morning as her loud-ass kids and harried husband bust out the door to school and work. Paty (Higareda) is the trophy wife of a would-be politician who’s a major buttwipe for many reasons, including his insistence that she get botox and a boob job so he’s more electable. Famela (Paola Nunez) is a career gal trying to pin down her husband for a few minutes because she’s ovulating. And Estrella (Valeria Vera) is the “unconventional” one, wild pink hair, eternally single, horny as heck, always swiping at the dating app, never ever willing to be pinned down.

And hey guess what, none of them is content, which is just shocking I tell you, SHOCKING. They get together to sip wine and whatnot, and decide it’s time to shake things up and go on the road trip they always talked about so they can check some of the stuff they always wanted to do and never did, and considering they’re in their 30s and precariously close to middle-age, it’s all stuff that they think they should probably do before they’re too old to do that stuff, like doing a striptease and hitchhiking, that kind of stuff. They have other motives too: Marilu, discontent with her marriage, wants to confess her love to a long-lost ex. Famela wants to spread her late, beloved mom’s ashes. Paty wants to stop at a plastic surgeon for the most perfectest breast implants ever made. And I think Estrella is just here for the female bonding, and to be the offbeat one, the extra comic relief that movies like this always have (think Melissa McCarthy in Bridesmaids), and because she’s the one with the Thelma and Louise convertible.

Just as they fire up Shania Twain and hit the road, a tree limb clobbers Estrella, and then they get stuck in traffic, and then there’s a chicken stampede, and then they pick up a hitchhiker (Claudia Pineda) with a suitcase full of sex toys, and then they accidentally shoot out the window of a gas station with a pistol, and then they eat bad tamales and puke in a water fountain in the lobby of a luxury hotel, and then they have heart-to-heart conversations, and then… it goes on like this, as they tick off their bucket list and the screenplay ticks off every damn cliche from the genre, which ticks us off in the process.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Less Girls Trip or Bridesmaids, more the drecky ripoffs, especially the ones on Netflix like Desperados and Carnaval.

Performance Worth Watching: One gets the sense that Vera would be quite funny if someone wrote decent jokes that weren’t regurgitated from too many other movies.  

Memorable Dialogue: The following one-liners are prime examples of the quality of this movie’s comedy: “My mom’s smeared on your forehead.” “This is the exact moment for slow motion.” “You stole boobs?”

Sex and Skin: The striptease happens, but it never gets any nudie-er than Hustlers. And there’s also one of those ancient, decrepit “comedy” scenes in which a character takes off her clothes but items in the foreground are strategically positioned in front of the naughty bits.

Our Take: Queens on the Run is less You Go Girls, more Go Away, Girls. It makes up for its lack of fresh comedy with incessant shrillness, and the occasional chicken reaction shot. It has boob jokes, puke jokes, girls-can-fart-too jokes and the inevitable sequence in which they hitch a ride with a busful of hippies and accidentally consume psychedelics and go on an interminable drug trip complete with hallucinations and blurry-on-the-edges wide-angle-lens shots and then wake up face-down in embarrassing positions. It’s the type of scene you’d want to fire into the deepest recesses of space, if not for the fear that aliens would find it and think our species consists entirely of drips and morons.

The movie offers no surprises whatsoever – not in the character arcs, or the zany situations they find themselves in, e.g., car chases, gun fights, spinning on stripper poles while wearing skimpy almost-nothings, touching a butt plug not knowing it’s a butt plug and then dropping the butt plug once you realize it’s a butt plug. And its cheap, choppy action sequences seem to be edited with (pauses to consult the Williams Sonoma catalog) an avocado core pit remover. This isn’t a movie, it’s a collection of exasperated tropes. It’s also one hell of a headache.

Our Call: Queens on the Run is awful, just awful. Like you’d do to a thin, flat rock you found on the beach, wrap your thumb and index finger around it and SKIP IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.