Common knowledge suggests that January cinema is typically mediocre, it’s where bad movies go to die. But, even muted expectations can’t quite prepare you for the tediousness of the new film from Miguel Arteta where the talented Rose Byrne and Tiffany Haddish try to spin something cogent from a script and film that feels to be imitating a real movie. For much of its brief running-time (the film is mercifully only 83 minutes long), “Like A Boss” feels like a joke. But, not one that leads to laughter but a practical joke on the audience – one where the general tediousness of the film seems too incompetent to be authentic. Surely the talent involved did not come together to make this clumsy mess of a film? But, somehow, inexplicably they did.
It’s nothing surprising to say that big studio comedies have been struggling for a few years. For every “Game Night” there are half a dozen “Overboard” or “Uncle Drew”. The worst trend of the genre is a devotion to recycling old tropes of comedy that have proved tiresome for years, low on character and high on improbable antics and laboured set-ups. So, in a way, “Like A Boss” is only following this trend – yet another leaden entry where comedy is synonymous with mishaps-done-poorly. The screenwriting duo for the film, Adam Cole-Kelly and Sam Pitman, pen their first feature-film script and it doesn’t bode well for their future work. Each plot-point and set-up feels created from a AI version of storytelling rather than anything organic.
In “Like A Boss” two thirtysomething women live and work together, best-friends since their teenage years. Because the tropes demand it, one is fussy and practical but lacking in confidence (Byrne’s Mel) and the other is more brash and fun but lacking in management skills (Haddish’s Mia). They have managed to create a small beauty company, although we’re not clear how long they’ve been running it. However long, they’ve managed to accrue almost half a million in debt. And despite their longstanding friendship the business-oriented Mel has been unable to tell this to her best friend and room-mate. It’s the first of many improbable scenarios to come, for despite this decades long friendship Mel and Mia have not learned how to communicate with each other.
One improbable turn deserves another so, that situation becomes catastrophic when a Claire Luna, an international cosmetic mogul, decides to buy-out their debt for a controlling share in their company. We know Claire is evil from the get-go, “Like A Boss” is compassionate enough to rob us of an unnecessary evil-reveal. Claire Luna’s singular intent is driving a wedge between the two, which becomes the crux of the story. And the crutch of the story. Nothing in “Like A Boss” is doing any work to justify why this mogul is so desperate to get her hands on what seems to be a marginally profitable company, except for her own thrill of being hateful. But the film’s screenplay is so improbable that in the same breath Mel and Mia are introduced as stoner-women in their thirties who snap a picture of a marijuana cigarette next to a sleeping infant, they’re simultaneously shown as these forward thinking moguls who manage to create a business from scratch in their mid-thirties with only two employees. It’s a reach, but then, who’s going to a mainstream comedy for thematic shrewdness? It’s the comedy, no?
“Like A Boss” can’t hit the mark there, either. And in a film of improbable and dire developments, it’s the most grating one. A film with Tiffany Haddish, Rose Byrne, Jennifer Coolidge, Natasha Rothwell, Ari Gaynor, Billy Porter, Salma Hayek and a late-film cameo by Lisa Kudrow– all actors who have played comedy efficiently – is unable to come up with one memorable comedic sequence. If this cast can’t muster up authentic laughs for an 83-minute film, then there’s something wrong in the development and there’s a lot wrong here. As a movie, “Like A Boss” is genuinely dreadful. It’s disappointing because Byrne and Haddish have a genuine and warm chemistry that threatens to keep the thing afloat for a few seconds here and there but the machinations of plot are exhausting and tedious, and it’s difficult for either to sustain the momentum when the film keeps putting them in increasingly ridiculous situations. Miguel Artera’s direction has no clear knowledge of a timeline – there’s truly no clarity on how long it takes the duo to run their business into debt, be bought-out, and then fix everything. A weekend? A month? A year? Who knows? Who cares? Not anyone involved in the production team.
There’s a marginal saving grace about female friendships and a film about women that doesn’t require a romantic plot to keep aground but at every turn, every reverse-shot and every excruciating fade to the next scene “Like A Boss” feels inept. The final revelation where the good guys outwit the one-dimensional villain is so turgid, because by that point we’ve forgotten that this crisis is supposed to be built on any tension. It all just plays as effortful, laboured and dull.
In a mid-sequence Mia and Mel are forced to fire an employee for no apparent reason. “Witness my tragic moment,” he commands them. Which feels about apt. “Like A Boss” is a tragic joke.
