As most people would probably agree, the title of this movie, “What Men Want” as well as the original from 2000 “What Women Want”, should be “What Men Think” and “What Women Think”, due to the fact that the entire premise is the main character suddenly having the ability to hear what the opposite sex is thinking. Aside from the impossible idea behind this film, the situations and dialogue that can spring from an idea like this are endless and potentially very entertaining. Unfortunately, this movie does not take anywhere near advantage of some very good scene and dialogue ideas, and in too many cases, takes the easy raunchy route. The original “What Women Want” released in 2000 was at best a below average movie and considering Mel Gibson was the star, reminds us that the year 2000 was 19 long years ago. Releasing a remake of an average movie does not make much sense, unless the remake has a significantly better twist and plot idea than the original. Unfortunately this remake fails on too many levels and is not nearly as good as the original.

What Men Want stars Taraji P. Henson as an employee of a sports agency and of all people Brian Bosworth, the former football and action star from the early 90’s who I have not seen in any movie in many years. You have to admire Bosworth for not giving up on acting given his very few acting parts in the last 10 years, acting is a very tough profession. Tracy Morgan is also in this movie playing the father of a high school basketball star about to go to the pros. I thought Morgan’s use of language and his funny way of talking was not enough to fix the dialogue in this script. This movie once again fails the audience movie rule for any comedy – nobody laughed in the theater I was in, an obvious must for any good comedy movie. “When Harry Met Sally” released 30 years ago, still stands out as a standard for all comedy films, as well as Annie Hall in 1977. There has never been a comedy movie released since 1989 that I have seen that comes close to these two all time classics in my opinion.

A good number of of the scenes involving back stabbing and office politics were realistic, very well done, and just about the only good thing in this entire story. There was one line at the end that I thought was very profound and basically stated: “nobody should ever derive their sense of self worth from the opinions of others”. An idea we should all live by.

The ratings for this movie on IMDB are a very low 3.2 and 47% on Rotten Tomatoes, I agree with both scores. What Men Want should be skipped.