Think Like a Man (2012)

Think Like a Man arrives from 2012, a year when the romantic comedy still believed in the group of friends, the montage, and the third-act apology. Tim Story directs four couples through the scaffolding of Steve Harvey's 2009 advice manual, Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, and the film takes that manual seriously enough to name its storylines after its taxonomy: the mama's boy, the non-committer, the dreamer, the player. The women read the book. The men discover the book. Everyone behaves as though a paperback could arbitrate a marriage. Roger Ebert found the whole exercise tiresome, and the intervening decade has not strengthened its case, though the cast (Henson, Good, Hall, Ealy, Hart, Union, Malco) offers a reasonable argument for watching anyway.

The film's chief cultural distinction is demographic. A major studio released a romantic comedy headlined almost entirely by Black performers, and it opened at number one, ending a four-week run by The Hunger Games. That is a real commercial fact, and a meaningful one for a genre that had spent decades treating such a cast as a niche proposition. What the film does not do is interrogate anything. Race here is texture, not subject. The characters are comfortable professionals with condos and complaints, and the screenplay shows no interest in the structures that shaped their lives.

There is a faint feminist gesture in the premise. The women weaponize a man's advice against him, turning the tables on courtship. The gesture does not survive contact with the source material, which is a book about accommodating men, and the resolution restores every conventional arrangement it briefly disturbed. The lecturing is mild, delivered through punchlines instead of sermons, which keeps the film watchable and its social ambitions modest. This is a standard rom-com with an unusual cast and no particular interest in saying anything. We classify it accordingly and move on.