Movie Review: 'Like A Boss' is Lazy Disaster

Like A Boss stars Tiffany Haddish as Mia and Rose Byrne as Mel. Together, the two have been friends since childhood and they now run their own struggling cosmetics company in what we can infer is: enter generic large city here, Atlanta maybe? Anyway, the two are in deep financial trouble because Mia, though remarkable with makeup, is terrible with money and Mel, though good with money, is bad at managing Mia.

They have one product that is successful but it is not enough to keep them afloat. Enter: the plot, headed up by Salma Hayek as Claire Luna. Claire Luna is an eccentric and highly successful cosmetics magnate who enters the scene to purchase Mia and Mel’s only successful product. Claire is deceptive however, she hopes to take sole ownership of Mia and Mel’s company and product by driving a wedge between the two friends.

That’s the gist, from there, the plot mechanics invent a way for it to matter that Claire is driving the friends apart, a lot of expository dialogue over-explains what is happening and a few expletives stand in for actual jokes until we get to the big, girl-power, friendship is magic denouement by which time you likely won’t care and the movie will be over before you even realize the credits are rolling.

Like A Boss sneaks into the realm of theatrical release length at just over 80 minutes and that is a desperately padded 80 minutes. In fact, the story of Like A Boss is so thin and so lacking in actual conflict or plot that three characters, played by the wonderful Jessica St Clair, Natasha Rothwell and Ari Graynor, are added solely to pad the running time. These characters are completely aside from the main plot and exist for a couple of strained gags.

Functionally, St Clair and Rothwell do call on Mel and Mia to act more like grown-ups, as they are more conventionally grown-up and successful, but they really don’t have much to do here. St Clair’s character is pregnant and that appears to only matter because someone thought it would be hilarious to include a sight gag involving a cake that looks like a baby emerging from a vagina. That’s the joke.

Now, I realize,I am giving WAY more thought to this than the producers and creators of Like A Boss did but I want to momentarily discuss the underlying theme of the St Clair and Rothwell characters. On one hand, these characters function as a way of demonstrating how irresponsible and childish Mia and Mel are. On the other hand though, through accidental insidiousness, these scenes function to reinforce notions of how to be a grown-up by conventional American, read male, standards.

By being so obtuse and lacking in care, Like A Boss reinforces the misogynist, conservative and silly notion that the only way a woman can be considered a successful adult is to be a wife and a mother. Mia and Mel are repeatedly shamed for how they live their lives without children or husbands. Later, their promiscuity is played as a comic touchstone but the movie is not laughing with them but at them. Mia and Mel's free sexuality is used as another way to shame them for being irresponsible.

I know the movie doesn’t intend these notions but the filmmakers are so lazy and so careless that these ideas bubble up underneath the movie and make what is already a tedious exercise in generic raunch into something more problematic and unfortunate. Like A Boss not only wastes a good deal of talented people, it implicates them in reinforcing out of date notions about societal norms and the roles of women within those norms.

Get married, have kids, that's the only way to be an adult and successful person by the accidental, incidental logic of Like A Boss. There is nothing inherently wrong with being married or having children, that is certainly a valid lifestyle but Like A Boss lazily reinforces this as the only way a woman can be considered successful and an adult.

The movie does this while also using the cover of faux girl-power talking points about Girl-Bosses as cover. As I said, I don’t think there is an intent on the part of the makers of Like A Boss to underscore ugly, misogynist talking points, that’s just the result of lazily not taking care with their own narrative. The makers however, appear fully complicit in using the coding of Girl-Boss culture as a marketing gimmick and that is yet another problematic aspect of one of the worst January comedies in some time.