Review: What Men Want Reliably Undercuts Its Gender-Flipped Premise

Confusingly, the film rejects the commonplace notion that women actually have a decent grasp of what men think.

What Men Want
Photo: Paramount Pictures

It might be shocking to hear Taraji P. Henson, as a type-A sports agent whose boss openly admits to resenting her for being a black woman, confess that she “never considered what men want” not long after triumphing over her boss. But this is a line in What Men Want, a gender-swapped update of What Women Want that doesn’t pass up the opportunity to undercut itself whenever it gets the chance. The film focuses on a corporate ladder-climber whose fatal flaw is a lack of sympathy that extends least of all to the opposite sex. Its reversal of the 2000 film offers a comic take on workplace sexism and racism that doesn’t revel in either, and audiences should at least be thankful that it cuts Mel Gibson out of the equation.

Despite her successes—such as signing several Olympic gold medalists—Ali (Henson) is passed over for a major promotion. Fortunately, after consuming some spiked tea from a second-rate psychic (Erykah Badu), she finds herself able to read men’s thoughts. And to get payback for being slighted, Ali uses her newfound ability to try and land a career-changing client while outsmarting her conniving co-workers. She gets access to their inner circle, from which she’s usually excluded, but the fun in watching her game the exclusive boys’ club is diluted by the film’s frustrating tendency to peddle back and paint this as a case of a more general selfish streak. Ali is shockingly unsympathetic to her supportive girlfriends and underpaid assistant (Josh Brener), all of whom she throws under the bus at some point, and this only serves to muddle the film’s more overt commentary about gender, race, and the workplace.

At the same time, and confusingly so, What Men Want rejects the commonplace notion that women actually have a decent grasp of what men think, which leads Ali to continually discover things that are very hard to believe she wouldn’t already know. Adam Shankman’s film frames her professional frustrations as textbook misogyny that she both avowedly resists and somehow fails to comprehend, relegating it to the black box of men’s inner thoughts. When, for instance, she hears her white co-worker thinking that she’s bossy because she pointed out his presentation’s bald racism, her reaction is one of shock more than anything else. Ali’s ability to manipulate everyone around her, but not understand these sorts of situations, makes her out to be cunning but at the same time hopelessly naïve.

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What Men Want often feels like it’s hiding a much more interesting film within itself. Most of the men’s interior monologues consist of dick jokes, dumb observations, and nasty remarks—all things your average run-of-the-mill comedy would have these characters say out loud anyway. These lines are funny, and feel largely spot-on, but Tina Gordon, Peter Huyck, and Alex Gregory’s screenplay tends to stop short of suggesting more substantial psychological dynamics that rig the workplace against women, and black women in particular.

This tendency carries over into Ali’s entirely formulaic romance with a single father, Will (Aldis Hodge), that follows the exact meet-cute-to-budding-romance-to-disappointment-to-reconciliation arc that’s typical of most romantic comedies. The most striking thing about their relationship is that its ups and downs have almost nothing to do with Ali’s ability to read Will’s thoughts. She seduces him before getting her powers and sabotages their relationship by treating him as a pawn in her attempt to sign the next big basketball star.

Henson is a versatile actor often cast as a snappy, hard-shelled professional, and here she gets to push against type a little. She elevates the film with a chaotically bouncy performance, and works a good back and forth with her co-stars. But Henson is underserved by the material. Perhaps the film’s inability to find very much of interest about men’s heads everywhere it looks results from the fact that sexism actually has little to do with a lack of communication or sympathy on women’s part. What Men Want is a decent rom-com, but by its end this failure has the unsavory effect of making its central conceit feel entirely extraneous.

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Score: 
 Cast: Taraji P. Henson, Tracy Morgan, Aldis Hodge, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Tamala Jones, Phoebe Robinson, Kristen Ledlow, Josh Brener, Jason Jones, Kellan Lutz, Mathias Alvarez, Chris Witaske, Max Greenfield, Brian Bosworth, Paul B. Johnson, Erykah Badu  Director: Adam Shankman  Screenwriter: Tina Gordon, Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory  Distributor: Paramount Pictures  Running Time: 117 min  Rating: R  Year: 2019  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Peter Goldberg

Peter Goldberg is a New York City-based film critic and copywriter whose criticism has appeared in The Baffler, Film Comment, and The Brooklyn Rail.

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