Who's That Girl
First screened in 1987 or 1988 / Most recently screened and reviewed in August 2025
Director: James Foley. Cast: Madonna, Griffin Dunne, Haviland Morris, John McMartin, Coati Mundi, Drew Pillsbury, Robert Swan, Bibi Besch, John Mills (!), Gary Basaraba, Faith Minton, Sean Sullivan, Dennis Burkley, James Dietz, Carmen Filpi, Glenn Plummer, Stanley Tucci. Screenplay: Andrew Smith and Ken Finkleman (based on a screen story by Andrew Smith). In Brief:
Aspires to '30s comic pace and flair but plays to too few of Madonna's strengths. Character easy to root against.
VOR:②
More maligned than it merits, but really asked for it with all these abrasive tones. Touching fondness for Old Hollywood but mostly gets it wrong.
When I was ten years old, the movie critic for our local news channel named Who's That Girl the worst movie of the year, and right then, at probably 6:55pm on a December evening, I stood up, walked to my bedroom, and went to sleep for the night. Not crying, but probably trying to cry. I hadn't seen Who's That Girl yet, but couldn't imagine this verdict to be true. Or maybe I was starting to grapple unhappily with this truth, given the fangs-out way people had talked about the movie for months, but I could not accept that my pop-cultural hero would build such a fiasco around herself or allow anyone else to trap her in one, or that people would rub her face in failure if she did. I think I'm telling you this to promise that rejecting Who's That Girl has never, for me, been about rejecting Madonna herself, which it definitely was for a lot of gleeful detractors. Over time, she's done plenty of her own rejecting, even keeping the soundtrack's hit songs out of circulation and off her greatest hits collections, to include the Grammy-nominated title track that sailed to #1 even as the movie foundered. I get the impulse. Who's That Girl is not good. But this bad movie was too quickly and permanently enshrined as a terrible movie, such that I want to confirm its undeniable shortcomings while sticking up for it a little.
I can imagine that the then-queen of reinvention must have chafed not just at the movie's critical and commercial failure (duh), not just at flopping so badly at the reinvention she most wanted to pull off (singer/dancer to actress/singer), but at working so hard and so thanklessly at a specific reinvention that another star in her shoes wouldn't have tried. Who's That Girl would work just fine as written if Madonna played her character as the tough, funny, headstrong, destabilizing broad she so obviously is; to be honest, it likely would have worked much better that way. Instead, Madonna committed to what seems like a film-long impression of Betty Boop by way of Joan Blondell, or one of the other bottle-blondes or natural towheads who frittered and fizzed so ingeniously in early '30s musicals and crime capers for the same studio, Warner Bros., that was behind Who's That Girl (and behind Madonna's phenomenally successful albums, too).
Never one to undercommit to a task, Madonna came up with a squeaky voice, a rat-a-tat delivery, a prancing walk, a head-cocked posture, an unfashionably thick brow, and other accoutrements to eliminate any outward or internal accusation of just "being herself" and to suit her vision of Nikki Finn as a naughty gamine straight out of Blonde Crazy or Smarty or Blondie Johnson or what have you. Madonna gave her all to this performance, which turned out to be way too much. Everything that made her so compulsively watchable in the 80s is still visible but uncomfortably lacquered with shrill affectation. For all that she skips and minces in character, as an actress she's in heavy-footed pursuit of pre-determined effects, clearly pondering every beat of her performance despite playing a free spirit, riding an uncomfortable line between the liberated and the strenuous. The glass-scratching voice is hard to bear, and Nikki's impetuous insistence on her own whims and priorities comes across as too pushy: toward her co-star, toward her easy-breezy script, toward her director, toward the audience. I am confident she thought of this, not without reason, as showing effort and a point of view, giving the movie an artistic reference point and proving that she would work at being an actress. But both Nikki and Madonna impose themselves too ruthlessly.
Because of all that pushing, it's easy to forget how much of Who's That Girl's plot is aggressively happening to Nikki, in unenviable ways that merit our sympathy. She's a girl in a jam, maybe even a lethal one. That's technically open knowledge throughout Who's That Girl, but you forget it because so much of her plight, including a vicious criminal setup and a long term in the clink, precede the actual movie. It's briskly condensed in a fetching hand-drawn credits sequence, such that your eye is on the artwork more than the info. By contrast, what we can't help missing for the next 90 minutes is Nikki being absolutely impossible, projecting not a care in the world, constantly halting any momentum in the plot, serially adding new voices and manners to her already overworked persona, all of it well above and beyond the bounds of screwball. Sure, she's ruining the wedding day of Loudon Trott, Griffin Dunne's male lead, but that's a plot dynamic we could roll with in a good farce; Melanie Griffith brilliantly pulled off something close to that the year before in Something Wild. But Nikki/Madonna is such a tornado, she seems to be responsible for Who's That Girl itself feeling disruptive, halting, somehow wrong. We can't enjoy the film because Nikki makes too much happen, chaotically instead of comically. And because Madonna is so evidently working her ass off instead of relying on inborn gifts, she feels like the reason Who's That Girl is WAY too much, despite also being rather little, in its silly logic, bitty structure, and short runtime. The fact that Warners clearly required that we hear new Madonna tracks pretty regularly throughout the movie, sung in a voice that has nothing to do with Nikki or her hyperactive, antiquated style, doesn't make anything easier, for the actress or for us. Madonna's working hard, maybe misguidedly hard, at a character very different from her while the real her remains all too present.
So Who's That Girl is indeed a mess, so much so that it mislays the question mark in its title. But I'll say this: I had misremembered the movie as a pre-popped balloon where nothing worked or seemed like it ever could have worked. Now, it's pretty clear to me what homage it's trying to pay, and how weirdly close it comes to pulling off a distinctive, film-literate experiment. If director James Foley had leaned even more into Warners' early-to-mid-30s legacy (75 minutes total, freight-train pace, no pauses for laughter, just kooks and jokes), we might easily have something. Dunne's game, Madonna's more than game, and plenty of the bizarre supporting cast, ranging from Coati Mundi to Sir John Mills, seem amiably ready for action. If Who's That Girl came out in a post-Turner Classic Movies era, when odd, speedy genre mashups like Blondie Johnson or Satan Met a Lady are as available to audiences as more polished, pedigreed screwballs like It Happened One Night or Bringing Up Baby (which, admittedly, Who's That Girl won't stop invoking), Foley's movie might have translated as working sassily in a B-movie grain that gets too little respect. Instead, loads of people accused it of vandalizing or flailing at a more "classic" comedy template. The script seems—well, the script is antic by 80s standards, but in another era, made by artists who knew how to shape and sell these things, the jungle cat, the arms dealer, the abandoned fencing skills, the rooftop rare-animals sanctuary, the shrieking bridesmaids, the blithe shoplifting, the incongruous Oscar winner... all of this might have seemed overmuch by More Is More design, instead of accidentally overmuch and out-of-step, and only allowed to be this way because nobody stood up to Madonna.
I can't say I like or enjoy the movie, and her acting is a big part of why. I'm also far less inclined to ride to Madonna's defense these days. But I get the larger vision of Who's That Girl, where it succeeded and failed, and how it might have been interested in a decades-old zone of pop moviemaking where fantasy and tackiness, "success" and "failure," aren't too easy to disentangle. Most comedies in the 80s had no vision at all, and even fewer seem to now. So I won't stop anyone from burying Who's That Girl, but maybe while we're shoveling, we can acknowledge what was possible in it, maybe even worth praising? Grade:C–
(I posted this review simultaneously on Letterboxd, where you can comment if you'd like.)
