'Like A Boss' Movie Review: Stale sex jokes and cartoonish villainy makes the Tiffany Haddish film unbearable
It takes special effort to feature Rose Byrnes, Tiffany Haddish and Salma Hayek in a comedy and completely waste their talents. 'Like A Boss', directed by Miguel Arteta, is a half-baked film, where the plot runs excruciatingly thin by the end.
In other words, it's a film on female friendships written by a man — so naturally, there will be a lot of botox, bosom and similar jokes on sex that fall so painfully flat that sometimes you just wish you could pour hot molten iron into your ears.
But let's not keep you from it: Mia and Mel are two close childhood friends who are running a thriving cosmetic company. Mia is is the outrageous and bold one who speaks her mind while Mel is the quieter and orderly friend.
Their friendship is indeed sweet and the chemistry between the two leads is commendable, but we don't get enough time to dwell on it as the film moves frantically to position itself in the comic genre.
Mia and Mel's cosmetic shop focuses on beauty "within the person", and there's a brief explanation about it phoned into the film somewhere. They package their formulas and gift packs called "One-Night Stand kits".
These are superb hits, apparently. Their two employees who blend well with straightforward stereotypes are Barrett (Billie Porter) and Sydney (Jennifer Coolidge). Billie Porter is uni-dimensional for the most part of the film, but there are one or two scenes where he does crack a joke worth smiling for.
Mia and Mel run into debt. They turn to cold and calculating money-minded Claire Luna (Salma Hayek), a millionaire whose shady endeavors and requests threaten to tear them apart for good. She owns the cosmetic market, but of course, is evil.
Hayek's comic timing, though funny in parts, runs out of steam soon, and even she doesn't know how to salvage the film. She becomes so cartoonish as a uni-dimensional villain that you just want to ask, "Why would she do this film?"
A woman in power must never be taken seriously, obviously. How long are we going to keep beating that dead horse? And, if you didn't notice, Luna herself brings up her breasts as a joke, because, ha-ha, so funny.
Sadly, in an attempt to be raunchy, the film does its best to get a smile out of you with every possible sex joke in history. Sydney's problem is also sex or lack of it. Mia and Mel's friends also only talk about sex and make sexual innuendo jokes.
It's an unbelievable fantasy that women can have the same feelings and complexities of men, and so the film delves into the premise of women cursing, cussing, talking about sex and just well operating like stereotyped men in films. The dialogues too seem so stilted.
Anyway, for a while, Mia and Mel call it quits.... for about five minutes, as they are pushed back together after everyone convinces them to be best friends. And then they decide to take Claire Luna down, with a speech and much shpeal on friendship and female love.
The ending of the film is lazy and sloppily done, as the writers just couldn't be bothered about how the film ended. The film had promise. It had the stars. But the result was just a congealed mess of an attempt at feminism and sisterhood.
'Like A Boss' released earlier this year and is now coming to Video On Demand (VOD) and BluRay.
