Just like the dating book “He’s just not that into You” Steve Harvey’s bestseller “Act like a Lady, Think like a Man” has now been scooped up by Hollywood and turned into a motion picture.
Centring around a group of friends from an interracial Basketball team and the women in their lives the story follows how both men and women play the dating-game.
Entertainer Steve Harvey and his book link the stories together by unabashedly stereotyping the characters into categories: The Peter Pan type, the man who just does not want to grow up and take on responsibility; the Mama’s Boy, the man who always puts his mother first, the Hit-and-Quit-it guy, the man who stops being romantic once he has had sex, or the “cookie” as Harvey calls it and then there is the woman who acts like a man.
As each sub-plot plays out the book gives solutions to each problem, like the 90-day rule before she surrenders the “cookie”, or make him chose between his mother and you and so forth. Sadly the film fails to be original, the script is not very funny and the talented cast (Michael Ealy, Chris Brown, Kevin Hart, Gabrielle Union, Meagan Good etc) seems flat.
In many ways “Think like a Man” feels like an African-American version of “He’s just not into you”, it has the same structure of mix and match stories, the characters are only superficial and there is no real passion or twists to the plot. The solutions for the problems are either common sense or just a whole load of nonsense and it doesn’t help that Steve Harvey pops up throughout the movie pretending to know it all. More often than not it feels like one long advertisement for the book but just not selling it.
As rom-coms go “Think like a Man” is no worse than many out there, but if you are looking for laugh-out-loud moments or clever punch lines they are few and far between and you always see them coming. Overall it may be better to spend the night at home with a box of cookies and watch on-demand TV.
jensinewall 