What Men Want (2019)

What Men Want arrives as a gender-inverted retelling of a 2000 romantic comedy, and it conducts that inversion with the thoroughness of a corporate audit. Taraji P. Henson plays Ali Davis, a sports agent in Atlanta who is passed over for partner while less capable male colleagues advance, and who acquires telepathy after drinking a psychic's tea. The premise is a delivery mechanism for workplace grievance. The boys' club is not subtext. It is the entire plot, complete with a poker game she crashes, a client's father who trusts only a woman with a family, and a boss who explains, aloud, that he cannot fire her because she is a Black woman. That line lands hard and lingers, which is more than most of the jokes manage.

The film's progressive instincts are real but unevenly distributed. Its casting is a deliberate act of revision, placing a Black woman at the center of a story previously owned by a white man and surrounding her with a predominantly Black ensemble. Race enters as an intersectional complication, tokenism functioning as a leash, though the screenplay treats it as one ingredient among many. A gay assistant exists, is fondly regarded, and is otherwise left alone. The feminist argument is the engine, and it runs hot.

What the film declines to do is lecture. The commentary folds into banter and farce, and the sermon never arrives. Nor does the film trouble itself with climate, economic critique, body image, or neurodivergence, and its history is strictly the present tense. The resolution is a promotion, a resignation, and a new agency, an endorsement of entrepreneurial striving that would make a shareholder weep with joy. What we have is a comedy of moderate ambitions and reliable pleasures, a remake that updates its politics without ever raising its voice. We have seen this before. We will see it again. The classification, at least, is clean.