What Women Want

What Women Want (2000)

Genres - Comedy, Fantasy, Romance  |   Sub-Genres - Fantasy Comedy, Romantic Comedy, Workplace Comedy  |   Release Date - Dec 15, 2000 (USA)  |   Run Time - 128 min.  |   Countries - United States  |   MPAA Rating - PG13
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Review by Karl Williams

Star Mel Gibson brings enormous energy and joy to this comedy that reaches a few humorous heights only to be vitiated by a view of the sexes that is surprisingly clichéd and retrograde. In fact, with its world of cocktails, male-dominated office politics, and men on the make, What Women Want plays at times like nothing so much as the misogynist, embarrassing romantic comedies of an earlier, less enlightened era, such as What's New Pussycat? (1965) and A Guide for the Married Man (1967). Fortunately Gibson and co-star Helen Hunt make an appealing, smart onscreen duo, rescuing the film from the archaic cliché bin. Scenes involving women in whom Gibson's character, Nick Marshall, is not sexually interested -- such as his daughter (Ashley Johnson) and a suicidal office worker (Judy Greer) -- are far more effective and absorbing that the rest. When his character is attempting to pick up women for romantic dalliances, however, Gibson's alpha-male role comes off as a one-dimensional sexual predator, a view of men that is as crude and offensive as the unfortunate "sexpot" caricature of women in a bygone day of filmmaking.