Like A Boss

I died a little inside on Friday evening. The 4pm screening of Like A Boss was the catalyst and Salma Hayek was the cause. She's so bad as the antagonist of the movie that she........sorry, I have to compose myself here......she may have ruined cinema forever for me. Yes, that is most likely hyperbole but you'll be hard pressed to find a worse performance in a film this year. And with it being only February that's saying a lot.

Mia and Mel are best friends and business partners. Together since childhood they've built their make up company from the ground up and both are justifiably proud of themselves and their creation. Mia (Tiffany Haddish) is the face of the company, outgoing, outspoken, happy in her own skin. Mel (Rose Byrne) is behind the scenes, stressed, the worrier. They fit each other perfectly, both tempering and lifting the other. Life's a breeze until Mel admits the company has some rather large debts they'll go broke trying to pay off. In swans Claire Luna (Salma Hayek), a cosmetics queen with designs on their company and when she offers to pay off their debt in return for a large share of their business Mia and Mel's relationship becomes strained. Which is all part of Claire's cunning plan.

First off, Tiffany Haddish and Rose Byrne are two brilliant comic actors. Great timing, never afraid to look silly or be crude and both can deliver a killer punchline perfectly. Their agents need a slap though for letting them star in this dull, painfully unfunny, retrograde, nonsensical piece of piss. You know a film is bad when you walk out of the cinema in the second month of the year knowing what you've just watched will be high on your top 10 shit list for 2020. Poor writing and overuse of horrible cliches spill off the screen giving the film a very dated sheen that no amount of references to social media and memes can save. Even it's big comic setpiece feels cogged from a 90's Farrelly brothers movie. For a story that claims to be all about female empowerment there sure is a lot of tropes abounding about women's friendships being all about competition and backstabbing.

Then Salma Hayek appears and drags the whole thing down another notch. She has comic chops, we've seen them in film and on TV in Ugly Betty but she's godawful here, a ghastly pit of painful one liners tied together by a terrifying wig and pout. Honestly, every time she appears you could feel the life being sucked out of the cinema. She doesn't even try. You'll not see a more blatant "I'm doing this one for the cash" performance this year. In an era where we're treated to brilliant women led comedies like Booksmart, Spy, The Heat, Extra Ordinary, Late Night, Girls Trip, Metal Heart, Ibiza, Blockers etc everything about this feels like a step back. When you have a dreaming pairing like Haddish and Byrne backed by proven actors like Hayek and Jennifer Coolidge you wouldn't be wrong to expect something special but you'd be far from getting it.

If you like your comedies humour free and predictable as hell then go for this. Everyone else should wait for Netflix so you can play it in the background and talk to your friends over it. In cinemas now if you hate yourself enough to go.