Think Like a Man Too

With the now-bankable Kevin Hart getting de facto top billing and a successful predecessor, it shouldn’t be very surprising that Tim Story’s Think Like a Man Too — despite its confusing title (I thought they were thinking like men in the last one) — topped the box office, even modestly. That being said, like many sequels (and the exact thing 22 Jump Street was mocking last week), the film is basically Think Like a Man (2012) all over again, with the sole difference being twice the budget.

That extra cash really serves zero purpose, since it seems most of it was spent on shooting the movie in Las Vegas. The general conceit of Think Like a Man Too is to bring the cast back together for a Vegas wedding between Michael (Terrence Jenkins) and Candace (Regina Hall). This, in a spark of unoriginality, leads to bachelor and bachelorette parties, something that might verge into The Hangover territory — right down to subbing Floyd Mayweather in for Mike Tyson. But Story’s film and Steve Harvey’s somewhat wholesome image (Harvey is the executive producer and author of the relationship advice book the film is based on) keep everything on the milquetoast side. That’s the general path the film takes, since saying the thing has a plot would be far too generous. There are just too many characters, too many threads they’re each following, and a constant influx of new characters make the movie a bloated mess. There’s not so much a dramatic arc as series of events that just ends in some tacked-on relationship advice that’s literally told to the audience via Hart’s narration (which, honestly, is better than the hoary sports analogies that his disembodied voice spouts throughout the rest of the movie).

The storylines that lead up to this, too, are barely fleshed out. While most of the film is dedicated to Michael and Candace’s wedding, there’s also, for instance, Jeremy (Jerry Ferrara) and Kristen (Gabrielle Union) mulling over having a child and Zeke (Romany Malco) and Mya’s (Meagan Good) various relationship problems. Where the film goes wrong is that these interpersonal relationships are sketched in through a couple of scenes, subsequently forgotten and quickly wrapped up in the last 10 minutes. Stretched so thin, it’s hardly surprising that the movie isn’t very engaging. The end result is a film that’s far too long and bloated to work as the light comedy it wants to be. Rated PG-13 for crude sexual content including references, partial nudity, language and drug material.