3. ''Just Pretend You're In A Video Game''
This line, or to be more precise, ''Just f***ing pretend like it's a video game...act like you're in a movie or something'' is spoken by Cotty while en route to their robbery, in order to motivate her friends into sticking to their (squirt) guns. Aside from the self-referential smirk, it's the former comparison that befits the film. For as much as the party scenes follow music video convention, the suggestion that the girls should live as though in a video game is surprisingly taken to heart. Once they place themselves in this fantasy world (a place where they have no qualms in robbing a restaurant, for example), it takes something truly shocking to jolt them back into reality. Their actions barely trouble their consciences (indeed, when Faith walks away, morality leaves with her) but instead give them an appetite for increasingly dangerous thrills. And Alien, whom, intriguingly, never finds out about the robbery, has just the job: a long-running turf war with mentor-turned-rival Archie (Gucci Mane). They blindly accept, as though clicking just another mission on a video game, and yet when Cotty is injured in a drive-by shooting, she simply returns home and life carries on. This blithe response prompts Alien to improvise a song about ''four little chickies'' (handily recapping on the film's main points); a darkly comic update of 'And Then There Were None'. The best thing about a video game life is that it has no consequences. The film's finale sees Alien, Candy and Brit (the girls dressed in neon bikinis and ski masks) storming Archie's island hideaway. Alien is killed almost immediately but as the girls fire round after round of their assault weapons, not a single bullet misses its target. Archie's guards and associates leap out from every corner to return fire, yet are overwhelmed by this impossible army of two. Never mind the fact that they're surrounded, or outnumbered, or that the ski masks would surely hinder their vision, the girls are apparently bulletproof. From Alien living the life found in gangster movies and 'Grand Theft Auto' to the Big Bad shoot-em-up, the fantasy world has served the girls well. Faith and Cotty may well have written themselves out of the story but you get the impression they could easily return if we only inserted more credit. And what do the viewers get in return? Their heroes; two half-naked young women holding machine guns. Who said the fantasy was just for the participants?