Review: Like a Boss’s Critiques of the One Percent Shroud Veiled Misogyny

Miguel Arteta’s Like a Boss opens with a montage of videos and photos of two besties, Mia (Tiffany Haddish) and Mel (Rose Byrne), from throughout their long friendship. It’s a cheerful sequence, backed by an upbeat, generic pop score that sets the film’s slightly treacly tone while emphasizing the supposed strength of the women’s bond. In the present, they run a beauty company called, unsurprisingly, Mia and Mel, and despite the slight tension between the former’s gruff sense of independence and the latter’s meekness, which stifles her ability to push her own business ideas to the fore, their friendship is, by all accounts, solid as a rock. So, when multi-millionaire cosmetics magnate Claire Luna (Salma Hayek) comes a-knocking with an offer not only for a potentially massive expansion of their brand, but to foot the bill for Mia and Mel’s $500K debt, one expects them to be over the moon.

Like a Boss, though, isn’t particularly interested in authentic or rational human behavior. Not content to merely ignore Mia and Mel’s appreciable shortage of business acumen, despite positioning them as strong, smart, and innovative women, the film also does an unexpected and unconvincing about-face by morphing these ride-or-die friends’ deeply felt connection into an emotional house of cards that crumbles under the most minute and transparent of Claire’s manipulations. Particularly frustrating in Claire’s attempts to drive a wedge between Mia and Mel—aside from the BFFs peculiar inability to communicate after her arrival—is her own murky, ever-shifting endgame. At first, she only wants controlling interest of their company, but then she seems truly interested in working with Mia and Mel to create fresh ideas for their brand. She decries the duo’s One Night Stand cosmetics package as past its prime, then steals the idea, promoting it through another small company she invested in when she could have made even more money promoting it with Mia and Mel’s blessing.

Claire’s ruthlessness is explained by the hostile fallout she had with her own business partner decades earlier, but the notion that a successful businesswoman would acquire a company simply to act out her petty resentments on two unsuspecting women feels less like a shot at the callousness of the 1% than thinly veiled misogyny. And Mia and Mel’s own actions do little to dissuade audiences of the absurd yet still-lingering notion that women simply can’t keep their emotions in check when it comes to big business or political decisions. Three successful women have rarely seemed as undeserving of their accomplishments as Mia, Mel, and Claire.

The inconsistent, half-baked characterizations and mixed messaging of Sam Pitman and Adam Cole-Kelly’s screenplay would be a bit more forgivable were they at least in the service of some inspired comedy. But Like a Boss’s comedic chops never sink into anything meatier than tiresome food gags, from a “Chekov’s ghost pepper” to a rather unfortunate post-birth vagina-shaped cake, and several protracted gags involving mispronounced words. (Most painful of all is having to watch Hayak say “fierst” instead of “fierce” at least a dozen times.)

As Mia and Mel’s loyal employee, Barrett, Billy Porter steals a few of his scenes, bringing a convincing gravitas and vibrancy to his role that leaves everyone else’s performances looking half-hearted by comparison. Of course, the scene where Barrett is fired is already amply ruined by the film’s trailer, and he’s ultimately relegated to the sidelines as the flamboyant friend on hand only to mend Mia and Mel’s friendship. But Like a Boss never makes a compelling case that that friendship is even worth saving because it never bothers to even make it—or anything else in the film—feel remotely genuine or meaningful in the first place.