Walk of Shame Blu-ray Review
Aaron Walker
July 5th, 2014
With the success of R-rated comedies starting in the late ‘90s more filmmakers have wanted to get into the action and make some money. So I suppose it was only a matter of time until the term ‘walk of shame’ (defined by the urban dictionary as the walk across campus in the same clothes as yesterday after you slept with someone and spent the night in their room) got put through the paces for us on screen. But like so many other terrible comedies trying to cash in on the public’s interest in people behaving badly, WALK OF SHAME does virtually nothing to set itself apart from the rest of the pack and is quite an embarrassment for star Elizabeth Banks.
In WALK OF SHAME, Elizabeth Banks (Effie from THE HUNGER GAMES movies) plays Meghan Miles, a local television anchor on the brink of stardom when her life suddenly falls apart. First she loses the anchor job to a competitor and then her boyfriend leaves her… so she agrees to go out on the town with her best friends and then all hell breaks lose. When Meghan wakes up in the middle of the night she’s in a stranger’s bed and when she tries to leave she finds that she no longer has her car, her phone, or any of her identification.
This all sets us up for some zany fun, or at least the filmmakers seem to think so because very little goes into the premise other than this simple summary. What’s more the film does little to establish that there is anything more to the story than this artificial setup. They don’t even waste time trying to establish Banks’s Meghan Miles as someone who has any ability at all as a newscaster. In fact, in the only two scenes in which we see her doing her job she seems completely inept, hardly able to read the words from the teleprompter let alone present any kind of humanity while reading the news.
The fact that everyone seems to think she’s relatively accomplished and actually being considered for a network anchor position is just so preposterous that WALK OF SHAME never gets it legs before it starts running. Instead it is assumed as a given that because Meghan is blonde and pretty she doesn’t really need anything else. It’s almost criminal in its underlying tones supporting that women should just be pretty, but not too pretty or dress too revealing lest they be marked as ‘hookers’ – as the joke repeatedly plays in WALK OF SHAME.
WALK OF SHAME tries, really really tries, to be a new female version of AFTER HOURS as I’m sure numerous other folks have identified. Only where the first movie was funny and unconventional (and brilliant), WALK OF SHAME is poorly crafted and ultimately a disaster. This is the kind of movie I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemies because it, like the filmmaker’s most notorious Adam Sandler movies (MR DEEDS anyone?) is the worst type of drivel coming out of Hollywood today, the comedy that makes you feel ill.
BLU-RAY REVIEW
Video: (1080p Widescreen 2.40:1) For all of its problems, WALK OF SHAME features a decent video presentation and looks pretty nice on the television if you can keep from tearing your eyes out.
Audio: (English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1) WALK OF SHAME has a decent audio track that plays well for the genre without really doing anything incredibly well or poorly.
The utter lack of special features on this Blu-ray is a double-edged sword. Why would they not include some outtakes, deleted scenes, and other features generally thought of as ‘part of the box’ when we buy the movie? But, on the other hand, who would want to watch them? Not this reviewer.
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