HOTJIST MOVIE REVIEW: WHAT MEN WANT (SPOILER-FREE)

Read Time:1 Minute, 43 Second

Joseph Omoniyi

Adam-Shankman-directed “What Men Want” is a work-place comedy-drama sprinkled with a little romance, screenplayed by Tina Gordon, Peter Hyuck, Alex Gregory. It tells the story of Ali (Taraji P. Henson), an unmarried, highly sexual woman in her late 40s who struggles in a world of men, a sports agency that manages sportsmen. After taking a concoction (a psychedelic tea) prepared by a psychotic psychic, she suddenly develops the ability to hear men’s thoughts.

The movie has a lot (not plots) going on almost at the same time. From Ali’s professional life to her crush on a neighbour (Kellar Lutz), her competition with her colleagues (power dynamics), her relationship (not romantic relationship) with her assistant, Brandon |(Josh Brener),

The movie is also a gender flip of Mel Gibson’s 2000’s “What Women Want”. Although I did not see that, so I am not going to make a comparison between the two.

The film drama has in one part, Ali as a sports agent, sidelined by her colleagues in a male-dominated organisation, struggling to fight her way through. In another part, her romantic relationships with men. And when she suddenly gains the power to hear their thoughts, she turns it to a tool to compete with the male folks and climb her way to the ‘top’.

There are however no surprises in the way the ‘hearing-men’s-thoughts’ was portrayed. The thoughts she hears are hardly surprises to her nor the audience. They just fill the blank space.

The movie also struggles with exaggerated comedy. Watching it in the cinema hall, you hear a couple of giggles here and there but, it is drudgy and monochromatic. It appears the actors are just adlibbing with jokes. Only God knows if the movie would be spared a lip-bend if it had not ‘deployed’ Taraji as ‘Ali’. Even she struggled at some points.

The film projected premise of this movie is that men are even more in thrall to their egos ‘appetites’ that women fear.