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Overall Rating
 Awesome: 10.76%
Worth A Look: 30.38%
Average: 27.22%
Pretty Bad: 19.62%
Total Crap: 12.03%
12 reviews, 86 user ratings
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| What Women Want |
by Godfather
"What do women want? That’s easy. Groundhogs."
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That’s right. Women want groundhogs. At least, that’s what the producers of this film believe. Picture if you will a movie where a guy who is a real asshole finds that due to circumstances freakish in nature, he is able to determine what a woman whom he is going to fall in love with wants him to say or do all the time. And by virtue of getting her to fall in love with him he becomes transformed into a nice guy who gets his true love and they live happily ever after. Sound good? It was. When Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell did Groundhog Day it was hilarious. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for this nice-try-but no-Kewpie-Doll-for-you attempt at romantic comedy.Mel Gibson plays Nick Marshall, an advertising executive at a Chicago advertising agency. Helen Hunt is Darcy McGuire, a woman hired from a rival ad agency and given the job Nick was in line for. Suffice to say, Nick is none too pleased to have his promotion given to someone else, especially a “broad”, and he is determined to do something about it. That night, in the course of a freak (i.e. lame) accident, he acquires the ability to read women’s’ minds.
Initially he uses this gift to aid in the forces of evil. He uses the insecurities of a lovely young coffee shop employee played by Marisa Tomei (and she looks fantastic as ever guys) to get her into bed. This is almost funny as she is inadvertently giving him mental blow-by-blow directions while they are doing the horizontal bop. In a more sinister vein, Nick starts stealing his new boss’ ideas even as she is getting them, and presenting them to their boss as his own. In the course of these bedroom and office coup-de-tats he also gets an understanding of not only what women are thinking but also the thought processes that lead them there. This leads to a contrived and forced re-establishment of a relationship with his fifteen-year-old daughter (staying with him while his ex-wife is on honeymoon) and, of course, the inevitable conclusion. He falls in love with Darcy (who falls in love with him) and he becomes father-of-the-year and an all-around great guy.
All of this is a perfectly harmless and even potentially funny little romp. So where does it go wrong? In order to answer that we need to look at Groundhog Day to see where that went right. In Groundhog Day Bill Murray’s character is self-absorbed and hence harmless. Mel Gibson’s character is an affront to women, hence offensive and not harmless. Groundhog Day has no annoying side angle that keeps you distracted from the main focus of the film. What Women Want uses this teenage-daughter-father relationship as a pathetic attempt to show Nick growing in all aspects of being a man. Instead, it is an irritating distraction in which you don’t give a shit whether he and his daughter like each other or not. In Groundhog Day the mysterious event that gives the character his knowledge, the repetition of the same day over and over again, comes across as real since each day the events change to new stimuli and, if that had truly been the first occurrence of that day, the events would have seem natural. In What Women Want the female characters are required to think in sentences so that we know what they are thinking. The listening of complete sentence structure thought processes is like listening to a pattern of speech made in very bad broken English. It is completely unnatural since people don’t think in complete thoughts but rather in fleeting moments that travel through our brain at the speed of light.
And speaking of thoughts that travel through your brain at the speed of light, I cannot help but wonder what would possess three academy award-winning actors, Mel Gibson, Helen Hunt, and Marisa Tomei, to agree to act in this thing. It isn’t a bad movie as much as a waste of time. I think there was potential here for it to be funny. With some better writing, and better editing from director Nancy Meyers, What Women Want could have been very funny. Instead, it only creates more confusion by adding to the dilemma what do women want. Big Groundhogs or small Groundhogs? Canadian Groundhogs or American Groundhogs? Groundhogs that see their own shadow or…For Hollywood BitchSlap, I’m the Godfather.
 del.icio.us 
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=3906&reviewer=142
originally posted: 05/13/01 00:16:12
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USA
15-Dec-2000 (PG-13)
DVD: 08-May-2001
UK
N/A
Australia
11-Jan-2001 (M)
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