What happens when you take a confirmed male chauvinist and magically grant him the ability to hear everything that happens inside the minds of women? Apparently you produce a hit movie and make a lot of money at the box-office. This is the general plot of the new Mel Gibson comedy "What Women Want," which, while amusing in parts, is a film that manages to be totally empty and predictable.
In "What Women Want," Gibson plays Nick Marshall, a character whose name is of little importance because he fails to display any personality traits that set him apart from dear old Mel -- and the audience never forgets whom they're really watching. Gibson's character has the best job in the world; he's the guy who designs all the ads featuring scantily clad women.
Gibson is granted the power to hear womens' thoughts right after a strong-minded business woman played by Helen Hunt is given a job as his immediate superior in the advertising firm. At this point, we learn that all women secretly hate Mel Gibson.
Overall, this is a very funny movie and worth going to see. Unfortunately, it also suffers in a lot of areas and will quite likely not be remembered a few years from now. Perhaps the most obvious, but also most forgivable shortcoming of the film is found in the acting. The main characters basically play the same role that you've already seen them play in a half-dozen other films. Now, I'm as accepting of a star-vehicle as the next guy, but why do producers seem to feel that they need to cast Helen Hunt as a bitch all the time?
Admittedly, she isn't really a bitch, just a woman with a hard candy shell that the male lead needs to melt through, but it's the same thing she's been doing in movies since the end of the sitcom "Mad About You."
Mel Gibson is, of course, Mel Gibson. His character is arrogant and one of the least likeable human beings to ever drag his troglodyte knuckles across the face of the earth, but he is still recognizably Gibson. The real acting goes on with the supporting cast who do a passable job of playing all the people that don't really matter to the story.
While generally the acting is fine and the audience believes what is happening to the characters big and small, Gibson's and Hunt's roles are nothing new and certainly do not stretch their talents in the slightest.
While the acting is the most forgivable shortcoming of the movie, much more difficult to ignore is the poor quality of the script. The film is scattered and lacking in direction. This would have been fine since this movie is primarily a fluff piece about the hilarious happenings in the life of a man with a weird power, but the writers seem to have forgotten that somewhere along the line. Instead, after about half-an-hour of actual comedy characterized by Mel getting into funny situations thanks to his telepathy, we are thrown into the middle of a three-way morality play.
Apparently someone thought that having one or even two morals to this story was not enough and decided to jam in three totally unrelated (and not so funny) storylines at the end.To have the bulk of the finale of a comedy not incite laughs is truly a sin.
The early parts of the film are somewhat random, but are at least funny since the audience gets to hear amusing comments being spit out of women's brains. Yet the end is simply random and choppy.
Except for the Helen Hunt storyline there is not enough background for the viewer to care very strongly about the outcome of two of the three climatic scenes.
To sum up, "What Women Want" is a fun, light-hearted movie that is also a cliched, overblown morality play. I suggest you see it if the trailers inspired you, but the movie will provide little in the way of quality.
