Directed by Tim Story
(PG-13)
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“Starting with its title,” last week’s No. 1 movie in America “must be one of the greatest examples of product placement in history,” said Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. Steve Harvey’s 2009 advice book Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man had a nice run, yet this “tiresome” romantic comedy wants us to believe that a group of bright African-American female friends actually began living their lives according to the radio host’s tips on catching and managing men. Mostly, though, the film “avoids clichés, or at least subverts them,” said Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle. As a recent divorcé, comedian Kevin Hart supplies “most of the big laughs,” but the rarer pleasure here is watching “four gorgeous, intelligent women”—Gabrielle Union, Regina Hall, Taraji P. Henson, and Meagan Good—“actually playing four gorgeous intelligent women.” Still, “the laughs are too infrequent and lazy to do the cast justice,” said Barbara VanDenburgh in The Arizona Republic. A truly original battle-of-the-sexes comedy would never devolve into “a soggy montage of sad eyes staring into the middle distance.”
