Directed by: Gita Pullapilly and Aron Gaudet
Starring: Kristen Bell, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Vince Vaughn, Paul Walter Hauser, Bebe Rexha
It’s too good to be true, ah!
This is the whole movie summed up in one sentence.
This movie claims to be based on actual events, which is possible, but again- don’t get the wrong idea- you can screw the system, that is a fact, but if the system screws you, that is real pain, which comes with huge repercussions.
Or in other words: desperate housewives go to war with big American corporations through one basic marketing tool of our “mass consumption” society called: free coupons.
Joanna (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) and Connie (Kristen Bell) are young suburban women who get trouble in their lives. JoJo was a victim of identity theft, so returning back to the small business branch where she was before is not easy. Connie is ignored by her husband after losing a baby and is a desperate housewife looking for a way to beat the greedy grocery stores through collecting enormous amounts of free coupons and using them while filling her home with tons of unnecessary grocery products.
But those coupons give her the idea of lifetime: why don’t we sell free coupons for half the price of the real value of the real brand-named items in the regular grocery store? But where to find thousands of free coupons? Of course: they print them. JoJo and Connie make connections with some workers in the printing facility in Mexico and the “new business” starts to roll on. In half a year, they already make tons of money, but after that, all that money needs to pass through the money laundering system. That is not gonna be easy. On top of everything, a couple of weird inspectors ( played by Vince Vaughn and Paul Walter Hauser) open an investigation about the suspicious coupons overflowing the grocery chains.
The movie is fun to watch. It’s filmed very well, but it’s confused in many ways: the correlation between the white and black populations in suburban areas, selling illegal weapons to white supremacists, big American corporations are cheated out of millions of dollars so easily by a couple of inexperienced suburban ladies, FBI bureaucrats give up the investigation and some no name investigators are the ones who take up the case.
All those elements are too good to be true in this movie and that’s why it all looks like one comedic fairy tale, like, life is so easy; I’m getting my milkshake and making millions at the same time.
It would be good if it was like that, but unfortunately, it’s not.
