Wednesday 5 February 2020

Like A Boss (2020) - Movie Review



I’m starting to feel bad for Tiffany Haddish. Oh sure, 2019 proved to be a quite fruitful year for her on the voice-acting front, between The Lego Movie 2 and The Angry Birds Movie 2, but on the live-action front, the side of her that got pushed into the mainstream with Girls Trip? Not so much. Night School was ghastly, her teaming-up with Tyler freaking Perry on Nobody’s Fool couldn’t have possibly sounded like a good idea, and while she managed to pull through okay with The Kitchen, that was largely in spite of everything around her, not because of it. Her current presence as a comedic actress seems to be codified by her being a potential saving throw for a film that needs outside assistance, rather than actually giving her material to work with. And with her latest, it seems like we’ve reached the bottom of the barrel.

Between her and Rose Byrne in the lead roles, there’s more than enough chemistry to go around, and they’re backed by some solid supporting talent in Jennifer Coolidge, Billy Porter and Salma Hayek in the villain role. Shame that they aren’t given anything to do. Like, more so than a lot of other comedies that descriptor applies to, as it seriously feels like writers Sam Pitman and Adam Cole-Kelly are straining to come up with sufficient shit for these actors to do. The film barely scrapes by at 80-minutes-and-change, and when part of that includes mentioning that Hayek’s Claire Luna had been sent drones as a ‘secret admirer’ gift from Jack Dorsey of Twitter (a moment that goes absolutely nowhere), the whole affair is positively malnourished and kind of desperate.

The closest this film gets to anything resembling actual character is with Claire Luna, and that’s only because she’s been given literal cartoon antics as her personality. With a tacky red wig that looks less like Jessica Rabbit and more Lena Hyena, not to mention a certain purple dress that looks like it was pulled out of Daphne’s wardrobe, she keeps puncturing holes in the film’s attempts at promoting solidarity between women. She’s the bad guy trying to drive our leads apart, and the film makes it a point of showing her as a performative feminist, only giving the façade of championing women just for the sake of a buck.

Which is the closest this ever gets to actually being funny, because holy shit, there is some serious cheek behind that assessment. Aside from how that specific aspect of her character is just another example of the film struggling to fill in its minor running time, the way that the arguments between Haddish’s Mia and Byrne’s Mel turn out… is it supposed to be this catty? I don’t normally get into this kind of finger-pointing (or, at least, I try not to), but knowing that the director, writers, cinematographer and editor are all guys, these scenes feel like there’s a bunch of guys standing just out of frame, waiting for a catfight to break out.

It doesn’t help that the film’s genuine attempts at feminist empowerment are quite embarrassing in how surface level and been-there-done-that it all turns out. It’s really bad when the closest to a decent idea it has involves two straight men who want to ‘dispel certain stereotypes’ about people who work in the beauty industry. And even then, the depictions of men (and more importantly, the treatment of men by women) reek of arthritic stereotyping and a lot of ‘what’s good for the goose’ hypocrisy. It’s feminist in the same way that the Spice Girls were feminist, except this doesn’t even have the personality to be distinctive against anything else it stands next to.

Actually, if this resembles anything in the pop music realm, it’s BO$$ by Fifth Harmony, and not just because of the shared title. It’s loud without saying anything of note, it’s obnoxious without any real sense of fun, and it name-drops Michelle Obama for no reason other than name-brand recognition. And my reaction to it is about the same as Camille Cabello’s when it gets to the “I want a Kanye-ye, not a Ray J” part in the music video: Discomfort and an urge to quickly brush off the whole thing. Can’t say I was expecting much from the director of Alexander And The tl;dr, but man, I don’t think I’ve ever missed Malcolm D. Lee and Paul Feig more than I do right now after sitting through this utter waste of time and talent.

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