Like a Boss (2020)

Like a Boss presents itself as a study in female enterprise, following two lifelong friends, Mia and Mel, who run a small cosmetics outfit and are menaced by a corporate titan named Claire Luna. The arrangement is conventional in its empowerment framing: women own the business, women hold the friendship at the center, and a woman plays the predator. Miguel Arteta directs the proceedings with the brisk indifference of a man completing a contractual obligation, and the result is a comedy that knows its commercial lane and stays in it. The movie is about women succeeding in business. That is the whole of its thesis, and it repeats it with the persistence of a smoke alarm with a low battery.

The supporting cast is notably multiracial, though the film never once treats race as a subject worth examining. Billy Porter appears, and the plot offers no romantic or identity content of any kind for him or anyone else, which keeps that particular ledger at zero. The setting is the beauty industry, a natural home for arguments about self-acceptance and body image, and the film declines every one of them. What it does offer is a gentle anti-corporate posture: the scrappy founders against the idea-stealing giant. The resolution, of course, involves a lucrative licensing arrangement, so the rebellion concludes with a favorable contract. The rich are mildly inconvenienced. Capitalism survives the weekend.

As for sermonizing, there is blessedly little. The empowerment arrives wrapped in slapstick, joint-smoking mishaps, and Salma Hayek chewing scenery with visible relish, so the messaging never ascends to the pulpit. It simply sits there, agreeable and inert. We are left with a film of modest cultural ambition, executed with modest competence, and received with the critical scorn it invited. Twenty-one percent on the aggregate. The cast deserved better. The classification, however, is clean and unremarkable, which is its own kind of mercy.