Like a Boss (2020)

“Like a Boss” (2020) was definitely one of those movies that used up all of its jokes in the trailers.
At least all of those scenes made it into the movie, but if you’ve watched the 90-second TV spot, you’ve seen everything this movie had to offer.

Mia (Tiffany Haddish) and Mel (Rose Byrne) were BFFs from middle school who had turned their youthful enjoyment of makeup artistry into a floundering business over the course of 20 years.
Mia was the creative powerhouse of the duo, while Mel was the mousy bookkeeper.
Mel noticed that their business was financially crippled and Mia’s reaction was, repeatedly, some iteration of “eh, it’ll work out.”
A fine response from a teenager with no grasp of money; a not-fine answer from an adult who had to pay taxes and facility fees.

Mia and Mel were contacted by Claire Luna (Salma Hayek), the CEO/founder of Ovidia - the largest cosmetics brand in the country - who was interested in buying their small company and adding it to the massive Ovidia portfolio.
That made sense - large companies buy up smaller companies all the time, especially ones that are in the same lane but do slightly different things.
But Claire apparently just wanted the name of the business that Mia and Mel founded, “Mia & Mel,” which didn’t make sense as the business name meant almost nothing outside of the city Mia and Mel were from and where their sole storefront was located, so there’s no reason Ovidia couldn’t create a “Tia & Tel” sub-brand and plagiarize their favorite ideas.
Furthermore, Claire immediately set out trying to realign the tiny company from the ground up, the colors of the makeup, the marketing, the store staff, etc.
Why? Who knows!

As Megan pointed out: the investors on “Shark Tank” don’t want to change the businesses they’ve invested in, they want it to succeed as-is.
You could make the suggestion that Claire was simply wiping out her competition, which...maybe, but it was clear that Mia & Mel wasn’t a serious contender to Ovidia, and as Claire knew of the financial problems the duo were facing, Mia & Mel didn’t have long before it’d have to shutter its doors anyway.

Claire’s plan for success was to buy her way into 49% control of the brand, turn the partners against each other, then snatch 51% or greater control and then run everything - a chain of events that presumably worked for her multiple times in the past.
So, considering that Luna only had 49% stake in Mia & Mel corporate, it made even less sense that Mia and Mel let her walk into their store and start bossing them around.
It was obvious that Mel wanted to finally make a massive profit from their struggling business, but as Claire gave them almost $2.3M when they signed the contract, her willingness to listen to Claire’s complaints was stupid.

The climax of the movie was when Mia and Mel launched a doozie of a publicity stunt to thoroughly embarrass Claire. For us as the audience, it was cathartic because we knew how devious Claire had been and how much she’d worked to knee-cap Mia and Mel’s business and destroy their friendship.
However, as this clearly took place in the real world, the press at this event wouldn’t have known about Claire’s behind-the-scenes skullduggery, so Mia and Mel’s actions would very easily have been spun by Ovidia’s PR team, immediately turning the duo into industry-wide laughing stocks.

Mia was entertaining, if only because her character felt the most fleshed-out. I got the best sense of self from her throughout the movie, but her childish unwillingness to learn and understand how money worked was immediately annoying.

Mel, on the other hand, was surprisingly spineless and easily capitulated, instantly turning on Mia as soon as Claire voiced even the slightest bit of discontentment. That behavior was attributed to Mel’s broken relationship with her abusive, drug-addicted mother, but that felt like an excuse the director used to try to rationalize Mel’s behavior, to cover the fact that she was actually just a poorly written character.

Claire was cartoonishly evil. While her corporate headquarters was a large white building, it would have made just as much thematic sense if it was all-black and had a perpetual storm cloud over it. When interacting with other characters, Claire was constantly belligerent and barely capable of disguising the fact that she was the villain. Kudos to Hayek for acting that right, shame on the director for wanting a character that might as well have just yelled “I’m the villain” in every scene.
As Claire was played by Hayek, her generous bosom got a fair amount of attention between the dialog and the wardrobe department. As this was a movie about women, dealing with women, solving a problem with zero romantic male interests, I can only assume Claire existed as she did to draw in a male audience that otherwise would have had zero interest in seeing this.
Furthermore: someone in the makeup department decided that Claire needed to be a redhead, which looked terrible and didn’t make sense for a character who was clearly of Latino descent.

There were three supporting characters of note: Barrett (Billy Porter), Sydney (Jennifer Coolidge), and Josh (Karan Soni).
Barrett was magnificently flamboyant and easily my favorite character of the movie.
Sydney was a failure of a human being - the kind of failure that makes you wonder how she dresses herself every day.
And Josh was just Karan Soni in another role. He plays the exact same guy in every movie he’s in, so I don’t know if he has any other characters to play besides “skinny, emasculated man.”

The Channel brand was in this movie, as Claire wore a gem-encrusted logo in one scene, which meant that Ovidia existed in the same universe as ours, which meant Mia and Mel’s “be proud of yourself” shtick would have had to compete directly against the “be proud of yourself” campaign that real-life Aerie has been running for years.
I’m not against body positivity and brands that want to push it, but it certainly seems like it’d be a massive up-hill battle for Mia and Mel to fight on the commercial stage against a solidly-entrenched incumbent.

I don’t remember anything about any special effects or soundtrack, so those usual reference points are a wash this time around.

We were treated to an extended scene of three semi-autonomous quadcopter drones floating around in the Ovidia HQ lobby for some reason. The scene was just there. It tied into nothing about the rest of the movie and didn’t have any kind of payoff later. It was literally just a fluff scene to fill out time.

This movie apparently happened over the course of several months, possibly a year (not including the ‘one year later’ epilogue), but I couldn’t track that except for one time when Mel mentioned the passage of “months.”
There were no title cards or seasonal indicators or even meaningful wardrobe changes that showed that an appreciable amount of time had passed, so for all intents and purposes, the entire movie happened over the course of six days.
That’s bad on the director - there are plenty of ways to display time happening, and not using any of them is a failure of storytelling.

As this was a movie staring Tiffany Haddish, the “comedy” was almost entirely juvenile slapstick and boring, uninspired cursing - the kind that makes you roll your eyes instead of saying ‘oh snap!’
It earned an “R” rating because the script included the words “motherfucker” a couple times and had some unnecessarily graphic references and euphemisms to sex acts, but those parts could easily have been watered down into solid PG-territory if they really wanted to.

This movie earned a 2-Claw because it was just barely good enough to enjoy from the comfort of my couch, but it would have been more tolerable at 30,000 feet.