I was so not looking forward to this movie that I started out watching it at 1.2x speed just cuz I was like "I don't want to give this 130 minutes of my life, let's shave a few of those suckers off." But then I thought it was so charming and funny and unexpectedly progressive! It's a mixed bag for sure, the gay panic's obviously not good and the women of color characters are, well, yeah, not great, and any "men are from mars, women are from venus" type premise will always feel a little retrograde. But it's mostly about an asshole alpha male realizing that most of the women around him think he's a buffoon, or are scared of him or resent him. People always joke about this movie like "what's scarier than Mel Gibson reading women's minds?" but the whole gist of the mind-reading thing is not that he's like snooping in their brains but that he's finally forced to actually listen to women, and not just that, but he hears how women really feel and what they can't say to him because he's in a position of power both due to his job and just because he's a man! In this ep they dismissively say "it's about a macho guy learning to see women as human beings" but I think that's valuable, there are so many men who don't and this film does a pretty good job, in a broad, frothy way, of illustrating some of the mechanisms of patriarchy, how male power silences and distorts and dehumanizes women and puts men in a self-sustaining bubble of oblivious cockiness. That's a highfalutin way to describe this movie but it wraps some genuine, much-needed insights up in a movie with leg-waxing slapstick, a gratuitous dance sequence, a shopping montage, and Mel Gibson preventing Judy Greer's suicide(?!).