What Men Want review: Taraji P Henson's gender-flipped Mel Gibson remake is just as unwanted as the original
Dir: Adam Shankman; Starring: Taraji P Henson, Tracy Morgan, Josh Brener, Aldis Hodge, Richard Roundtree, Erykah Badu. 15 cert, 117 mins
Some gender-swapped remakes are the source of more trouble than others. Spritz some oestrogen over Ghostbusters and half the internet goes berserk, but do the same to a 19-year-old Nancy Meyers romantic comedy and, well, you’ll be lucky to elicit more than a shrug.
Adam Shankman’s What Men Want is pure shrug cinema: not bad so much as wispily superfluous, which may not come as a surprise if you can recall the similarly disposable 2000 original.
That film starred Mel Gibson as a chauvinistic ad man who discovered one morning he could read women’s minds, while this female-led spin features Taraji P Henson, star of Hidden Figures, as an abrasive sports agent who can’t connect with her boorish male colleagues. As before, the core gimmick is initially good fun but burns itself out almost immediately, leaving nothing behind but an uninspired life-work-balance farce and a Generation Game conveyor belt’s worth of product placement.
This time, the supernatural talent is bestowed during a raucous hen night, when Henson’s Ali quaffs a bowl of hallucinogenic tea served by a psychic (an enjoyably loopy comic turn from the soul singer Erykah Badu) and is later knocked unconscious by a giant inflatable, ahem, appendage.
She uses her abilities to pursue a gifted but still-unsigned young basketball player (Shane Paul McGhie), whose control-freak father (30 Rock’s Tracy Morgan) is intent on throwing every spanner he can find in the works.
Gender-flipping the premise does it no favours, since rom-com men are hardly creatures of sphinx-like inscrutability in the first place. The intel Ali extracts with her new talent proves far from revelatory – in short, men are anxious, hormone-addled, perpetually bluffing twits – and she gets the most mileage out of it on poker night, when she’s able to snoop on her colleagues’ hands.
In fact, the film’s central ruse, which sees Ali passing off a handsome one-night-stand (Aldis Hodge) as her husband and his adorable child as her son to project a stable, family-woman image at work, barely involves her newfound psychic powers at all, and feels like it could have been dropped into the plot virtually unaltered from an unrelated script.
Still, Henson is a natural at this kind of broad comedy, and throws herself into the goofy-cringe set-pieces with enough energy to elicit giggles, if not outright guffaws. The result rarely looks like something anyone might want, male or otherwise, but it passes the time, just about.
