83 min | R | January 10, 2020 | Paramount Pictures
Two best friends run a cosmetics company that is drowning in debt, and a beauty mogul offers to bail them out while quietly plotting to tear them apart. The cast can do anything. The movie asks them to do nothing.
Mia Carter and Mel Paige run a cosmetics company out of the house they share. They have been best friends since childhood and they are half a million dollars in debt. Beauty mogul Claire Luna offers to buy a stake and rescue the business. The catch is that Claire wants the partnership to collapse so she can seize the whole company. The film presents itself as a story about female friendship straining under money. It is really a string of broad gags hung on a plot you can predict from the premise.
Tiffany Haddish plays Mia as the loud, impulsive half of the duo, and the film keeps waiting for her to improvise her way to a laugh. Rose Byrne plays Mel as the anxious one who counts the money and wants to sell. The two share real warmth in the quiet scenes, and the script keeps cutting away to a set piece. Salma Hayek plays Claire Luna with a frozen grin and a purr that announces the betrayal long before it lands. Billy Porter plays Barrett and turns his one big scene into the only moment anybody will remember. Jennifer Coolidge plays Sydney and salvages a few stray lines through pure delivery.
Miguel Arteta directs from a screenplay by Sam Pitman and Adam Cole-Kelly. Arteta has made sharp, uncomfortable comedies like Beatriz at Dinner and Chuck & Buck. None of that instinct survives the move to studio gloss. The film is lit flat and bright like a sitcom and shot in clean wide coverage that drains the timing out of every joke. The editing races through the story and never lets a scene breathe. The broad set pieces arrive on cue and resolve before they can land.
There is a real movie buried in this premise about two women whose friendship is the actual asset a corporation wants to strip. The film gestures at it and then runs back to the next gag. The cast is loaded with people who can be funny in better material. The script hands them stock types and a finish you see coming from the first act. Like a Boss takes performers who could carry a smart comedy about money and loyalty and wastes every one of them on the dumbest version of the idea.