WHAT MEN WANT
US, 2019, 117 minutes, Colour.
Taraji P. Henson, Aldis Hodge, Richard Roundtree, Josh Brenner, Max Greenfield, Kellan Lutz.
Directed by Adam Shankman.
How do you make a romantic comedy when the central character is, as she says later, monstrous? Well, probably develop the monstrous aspects of the character and then contrive her have a conversion experience. This is very much what we might call the Judd Apatow Syndrome, start raucous and possibly objectionable, stage a change of heart and then everything is nice, even explicitly moralising and moralistic, at the end.
The screenplay for this film is based on the 2000 comedy starring Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt, What Women Want. The tagline was amusing “a man is listening to what a woman is thinking, at last!�. So, this time a woman is listening to what men are thinking – and it is generally not very flattering to the men.
Taraji P. Henson’s Ali is, to say the least, a tough cookie. She works for a top sports agency and is expecting to be named a partner in the firm. It doesn’t happen – and the boss condescendingly says that she is very good in her female channel but can’t measure up to the big boys even though she has several contracts to her credit.
She has a group of girlfriends who chatter and who all visit a particularly weird clairvoyant who allegedly reads the future but communicates to Ali, the power to hear what men are thinking. Obviously, it works to great business advantage, knowing what her colleagues and rivals really think but rarely say, knowing what a potential young basketball champion and his aggressive father (whose name is Joe Dollar!, Tracy Morgan) are planning and want. There are internal shenanigans that the company, fawning on father and son, doubledealings to get international contracts. But, the nice lad and Ali knowing his thoughts will help towards a profitable and a pleasing solution.
She encounters an attractive bartender, Will (Aldis Hodge), has a sexual encounter with him, discovers that he is a widower with the young son (intelligently precocious) and, at an emergency moment, pretends that she is married to Will and they are a family. Obviously, this will become a sticking point – and, potential for a change of heart and a happy ending.
Also in the act is her father, veteran Richard Roundtree, a boxer, who trained his daughter to be tough, to box and also serves as a punching bag and a sounding board for her in her problems.
The trouble is, probably, that too much of the long running time focuses on Ali and her unlikable self, only a short time at the end for her change of heart.
For most of the running time, there is a whole lot of unsympathetic stuff going on. But, it does lead to a nice ending.
