What Women Want

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Year of release: 2011

Genre: romantic comedy

Director: Daming Chen

Producers: Daming Chen, Liu Jing, Dede Nickerson, Yu Dong

Writer: Daming Chen

Cinematography: Max Da Yung

Editing: Nelson Quan

Music: Christopher O'Young

Stars: Andy Lau, Gong Li, Yuan Li, Chan Chi-Pang, Li Cheng-Ru, Zhu Zhu, Russell Wong, Anya, Mavis Pan, Hu Jing

Not rated; contains IIA-level mild language

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To start out this review, I must be honest in saying that the only time I have ever watched the original version of What Women Want was late one post-bar night on TBS, where your friendly neighborhood reviewer was under the same level of inebriation as the film's star, Mel Gibson, was when he infamously called a female police officer "sugartits" during a traffic stop.

So, taking this film on its' base elements and putting aside any real comparison between the US and Chinese versions, it is awful even by the low standards of your average romantic comedy, assaulting the audience at every turn with the level of insipidness it falls down towards at every possible moment.

What Women Want is obviously a film that was born out of marketing committee meetings. Created to appeal to China's growing female middle class, the movie presents a Beijing full of clean and shiny skyscrapers, where people wearing Italian fashions take sips of French wine in between texting each other on their iPhones. It's mass crass consumerism at its' "finest", and that is What Women Want's main problem.

Totally plastic to the point where the actors have a odd sheen to them, most everyone outside of this picture's target demographic are quickly going to be reaching for a bottle of aspirin or the eject button long before What Women Want ends its' painfully overlong 116-minute running time.

Yes, I could hear some of you twelve readers out there saying that I'm not the sort of person that would "get" a movie like What Women Want. Sure, I will grant that watching a romantic comedy isn't usually tops on my list of pleasurable ways to spend an evening. However, a bad film is a bad film, no matter the genre and which way you slice it, and What Women Want is terrible.

Of course, there are many out there that are going to be just fine watching Andy Lau and Gong Li clumsily flirting with each other for almost two hours, but I am most definitely not one of those viewers. As much as I generally enjoy Lau and Li's work, their star power alone can't carry this production over the pitfalls of lack of actual comedy, zero sexual chemistry, and an extremely lazy film-making style put forth by director Daming Chen.

RATING: 3