What Men Want

"This is not a curse. This is a gift."

In the early noughties, Mel Gibson starred in a romantic-comedy in which he falls into the bathtub with a hairdryer and subsequently gains the ability to read women’s minds. Now, almost 20 years later, Taraji. P Henson is starring in the gender-switched reboot of the original.

We see her character consistently giving it her all at work and going nowhere, whilst the men around her continue to climb to the top of the occupational ladder. After she drinks a questionably concocted tea, we find our new protagonist with the same magical ability, except she is reading the men’s minds.

For a film that starts out so painfully slowly, it picked up surprisingly after the first act played itself out and the mind-reading premise actually opened its wings and took flight. Unfortunately, the tedious wait for this to happen meant that no one in the audience was ever fully engaged in what was going on.

This film proved to be funnier than most mainstream comedies we’ve seen released lately, mostly thanks to the earnestly written script and the jokes that, for the most part, seemed to land. However, it wasn’t anything we haven’t seen before and it definitely didn’t bring anything fresh to the genre. It was very straightforward and very predictable, but Taraji P. Henson did bring a lot of joy and charm to the material with a really strong lead performance from her that we don’t get to see all that often.

Due to this films outdated cliches and the lacking of any new social commentaries that we haven’t already had repeatedly drilled into us, this film fails to assert itself as a modern enactment of an already conventional movie, and instead felt like the same tired message.

★★★