Director
Miguel Arteta

Starring
Rose Byrne, Tiffany Haddish and Salma Hayek
Like A Boss is the story of two best friends, Mia and Mel (Tiffany Haddish and Rose Byrne) who together created their own cosmetics business. When makeup mogul Claire Luna (Salma Hayek) offers to buy out a percentage of their business, cracks begin to form in their otherwise sturdy friendship. Luna then pits friend against friend in an attempt to gain the controlling interest in the business, forcing both women to re-evaluate the value of their friendship.

The first 15 minutes of Like A Boss is everything you would have hoped for in the pairing Rose Byrne and Tiffany Haddish, who have both been responsible for some of the greatest female driven comedic performances of the past decade. Most of the laughs throughout the film happen here.  Unfortunately, from there it all falls a little flat.

When Haddish burst onto the scene in Girls Trip in 2017, she seemed frenetic and fresh and destined for great things. What became evident in Like A Boss though is that Tiffany Haddish can only play Tiffany Haddish. What was once fresh has very quickly become stale and uninteresting. Rose Byrne who is the Queen of understated and subtle comedy gems was too understated to really make an impact here. Hayek as the villain is over the top and cartoonish in both appearance and performance and most of the jokes between the three fail miserably.

The meagre 83 minute running time doesn’t do this film any favours either. There simply isn’t enough time to thrash out any real character development and the whole story is very formulaic and predictable. It’s no surprise here that director Miguel Arteta has a directorial CV comprising mostly of television episodes. It’s evident that he doesn’t know how to build something for feature length viewing.

Overall Like A Boss isn’t terrible, it’s just that it’s also not very good. This ho-hum affair really wasted the talent that was at its disposal.

2 Stars

Moviedoc thanks Paramount Pictures Australia for the opportunity to review this film.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter