Haddish has one setting, loud and candid, and it is a good one. Build a part around it, as The Lego Movie 2 did, and she is the best thing on screen; let it run unshaped, as Haunted Mansion did, and it is only noise.
Fi1m perspective
Queen Watevra Wa'Nabi is a heap of loose bricks that never settles. She rebuilds herself into a horse, a throne, a heart, all the while singing a song that insists she is not evil in lines that make her sound steadily more so. Tiffany Haddish gives the voice a warmth you cannot quite trust, and that is her whole act in one figure: she tells you exactly what she is, at full volume, and you still cannot be sure. We laughed hard at her in The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part (2019), harder than at anything else in the film, and the song is the one sequence we would sit through again tonight.
She came up through stand-up, by way of the Laugh Factory Comedy Camp and the circuit, and it shows. There were small parts first, The Carmichael Show (2015–2017) on television and Keanu (2016) in cinemas, and then Girls Trip (2017), where she played Dina and left with the film. Night School (2018) followed, then a run of voice work and comedies, Haunted Mansion (2023) and Bad Boys: Ride or Die (2024) among them. Malcolm D. Lee has directed her twice and Kevin Hart has been her co-star twice, and those are the collaborators who have understood the assignment.
What she does is deliver a line as if she has just thought of it and cannot believe you have not. That is why audiences feel she is telling the truth, and it is a rarer gift than it looks. But truth at that pitch needs a film that knows what to do with it. In Haunted Mansion, Justin Simien hands Harriet the medium a house full of frightened people and never once asks her to lower her voice, so she is at the same level in every scene while Owen Wilson, treating the whole thing as a lark, walks off with the lines that land. Animation suits her better because the picture can be as loud as she is.
The complaint that she does too much is mostly a complaint about the films. She has been hired again and again to be Tiffany Haddish rather than to play someone, and after enough of that any performer starts to sound like an impression of herself. What we would like to see is a director who turns her down one notch and finds out what is underneath. Until then her best work is a queen who never holds one shape for long, and she is made of plastic bricks.
Biography
Tiffany Haddish is an American comedian and actress. Born in Los Angeles in 1979, she began performing stand-up comedy after attending a comedy camp as a teenager and went on to appear in guest roles on several television series.
She gained prominence as Jackie on the OWN drama If Loving You Is Wrong (2014–2015) and as Nekeisha Williams on the NBC sitcom The Carmichael Show (2015–2017). Haddish made her film breakthrough as Dina in Girls Trip (2017).
Her other credits include Keanu (2016) and voice roles in animated films. She was included on Time's annual list of the 100 most influential people in 2018. Recent work includes Harriet in Haunted Mansion (2023) and Tabitha in Bad Boys: Ride or Die (2024).
