4 / 10
Official trailer
What Men Want is the gender-flipped remake of the 2000 Mel Gibson romantic comedy What Women Want.
Adam Shankman directed. Tina Gordon, Peter Huyck, and Alex Gregory wrote. Taraji P. Henson plays Ali Davis, a sports agent at a major Atlanta agency. After drinking strange tea at a bachelorette party, she acquires the ability to hear men’s thoughts. She uses this ability to land a major NBA prospect as a client and to handle her workplace politics. Aldis Hodge plays Will, a bartender love interest.
Tracy Morgan plays Joe “Dolla” Barry, the prospect’s father. Erykah Badu plays Sister, the psychic. The plot inverts the 2000 original while keeping most structural beats.
This one is a frustrating miss, mostly because it had everything it needed. Taraji P. Henson is a star with real comic timing, the premise is a gift, and Tracy Morgan shows up ready to play. Then the script spends its running time confirming what its heroine already believed, and the movie plays like a pitch meeting that never got to a second draft.
The film made approximately seventy-three million dollars worldwide on a twenty million dollar budget. The commercial performance was modest. The reviews were mixed. The film succeeds in some areas where the 2000 original failed and fails in some areas where the 2000 original succeeded. The gender flip is the production’s central commitment. The flip works in some sequences and exposes its limitations in others.
What Made It a Woke Disaster
The 2000 What Women Want gave Mel Gibson access to women’s thoughts. The film mined comedy from a man discovering that women have inner lives more complex than the men around them recognized. The framing was that the gift forced Gibson to confront his own assumptions and become a better man. The structural argument was that men should listen to women. The 2000 film used its premise to make that argument.
The 2019 inversion gives Taraji P. Henson access to men’s thoughts.
The framing is that the gift confirms what the protagonist already suspected. Men are mostly thinking about sex, money, food, and dismissive things about the women around them. The film doesn’t use the premise to suggest the protagonist learns anything about men. It uses the premise to validate the protagonist’s existing position. Men are obstacles or distractions. The mind-reading is a tactical advantage in a hostile environment.
The film’s male characters are uniformly drawn as inadequate. Ali’s father is a tough-love disappointment. Her assistant Brandon (Josh Brener) is a wormy comic relief whose stupidity is the joke. The senior agents at her firm are sexist obstacles to her promotion. The NBA prospect Jamal (Shane Paul McGhie) is a passive talent whose father runs his life. Will, the love interest, is the one functional adult male in the film, and the script struggles to give him agency beyond reacting to Ali’s choices.
In the film’s worldview, the men in Ali’s professional world exist to be manipulated, and understanding them never enters the picture.
That’s the worst of it. The original at least let its hero learn something. This version hands Ali a superpower and uses it to prove she was right all along, and a comedy where the lead learns nothing gives me very little to laugh at.
For Writers
Gender flips that invert a premise without inverting its structure produce films that show worldview instead of develop character. What Men Want has the same plot beats as What Women Want with the gendered conclusions inverted. The 2000 film argued men should listen. The 2019 film argues women shouldn’t have to. The lesson is that premise inversions require structural reconsideration. If you flip who hears the thoughts but leave the rest of the script identical, you produce a film whose conclusions read as inverted assumptions instead of as earned discoveries.
The Wasted Premise
The premise is one of the more interesting comedic setups available in the 2010s. A woman in male-dominated professional sports gets the ability to read men’s minds. The comedy possibilities are enormous. The locker room politics of NBA prospect signing. The boardroom dynamics of a male-dominated agency. The dating-life implications of always knowing what the man is thinking. The script gestures at all three and develops none of them.
The strangeness the premise could have generated is missing. The film mostly uses the mind-reading as a plot device for moving Ali toward her promotion, and the basic comedic question, what do men think about, never gets asked. The script assumes the audience already knows the answer. I’d have thrown out the promotion plot entirely and let Henson wander through a locker room hearing everything. That’s the movie I wanted, and it’s sitting right there unused.
For Writers
A high-concept premise that the script uses as plot mechanic instead of as comedic exploration wastes its central asset. What Men Want has Taraji P. Henson reading men’s minds without ever using the device for real discovery. The lesson is that high-concept premises are gifts. They generate scenes other scripts can’t generate. If your script uses the gift only for plot advancement, you’ve built a film that doesn’t need its own premise. Commit to the gift. Let the comedy come from the discovery the premise enables.
Tracy Morgan
Tracy Morgan’s Joe “Dolla” Barry is the film’s strongest individual performance.
Morgan plays the character as a former athlete who’s now trying to manage his son’s career while also enjoying the lifestyle his son’s potential earnings will provide. The performance has depth. The character has contradictions. Morgan is doing the most committed character work in the film and the film around him doesn’t consistently match his energy.
The Morgan performance also points at what the film could have been. A film built around the Joe-Jamal father-son dynamic, with Ali’s mind-reading as the device that lets her understand and exploit the relationship, would have been a stronger comedy than the workplace-politics version the film produces. The Morgan performance is the production’s clearest signal that the script had material it didn’t commit to.
Morgan and the poker game are the only reasons I’d ever sit through this again. Every scene he’s in has a pulse, and each time the film cuts back to office politics I can feel the air go out of it.
For Writers
A supporting performance that points at a stronger version of the film signals the script chose the wrong story. Tracy Morgan’s work in What Men Want suggests a father-son comedy the script never wrote. The lesson is that strong individual character work can reveal what the script’s other choices should have been. Pay attention. If your best supporting performance is in a subplot, the subplot might be the actual film.
Craft Note
The poker game sequence is the film’s most successful comedic passage. Ali sits at an underground card game with NBA prospects and their handlers. The mind-reading lets her play with perfect information against men who don’t know she’s the gift. The sequence stages comedy through specific reaction shots and committed performance work from Taraji P. Henson. The scene runs about seven minutes and is the film’s clearest demonstration of what the premise could deliver consistently. The rest of the film doesn’t match the poker game’s confidence with the high-concept material.
Should you skip What Men Want?
4/10. I’m more frustrated with this one than angry at it. The premise is strong, Henson is game, and Tracy Morgan and the poker game show what the film could have been. Instead the script treats men as obstacles or fools, which caps how funny it can get, and it burns its best idea on a promotion plot. The 2000 What Women Want or Henson’s dramatic work are far better uses of your evening.
