Film Review – What Men Want

“What Men Want” is a remake of a 2000 Nancy Meyers comedy, which tried to make something silly and mushy out of Mel Gibson, back when that was still a possibility. It was a PG-13 production, as vanilla as it gets, with Meyers overseeing a mild battle of the sexes premise that shifted from frivolity to a deadly serious conclusion that touched on suicide. It was typical of Meyers’s uneven work, and the screenplay was certainly ripe for a do-over. Enter Adam Shankman, a crude helmer of terrible movies (“The Pacifier,” “Rock of Ages”), who has the bright idea to play “What Men Want” as broadly as possible, stuck between his desire to craft a hard R-rated version of the tale and the perceived demands of the mainstream audience, with sincerity trying to worm its way into a film that has no use for it. Shankman doesn’t know what he’s doing with the feature, so he does nothing, coasting on painfully inept jokes and sporadic ugliness to complete the job. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com