Audience-Alienating Premise: The remake being a Gender Flip of the concept, featuring a woman who is rejected a promotion over a male co-worker and told she doesn't connect with men. And for a dash of racial subtext, Ali is black and most of her co-workers, including her boss and the man who gets promoted instead of her, are white. The result is that the film becomes one of feminist empowerment, with Ali turning the tables on men who talk down to her and tell her to "stay in her lane", a complete reversal of the original film where Nick's behavior was thoroughly unlikeable and framed as such. Couple this with the facts that (a) the movie leans into male stereotypes hard while also daring to broach the much-reviled angry black woman stereotype for good measure; (b) the original film's reputation was mixed already; and (c) the general backlash towards remakes of older movies with women instead of men, and the result is a premise that audiences weren't really interested in, and the film didn't do well at the box office.
Awesome Music: Several Frank Sinatra songs play during the film since Nick is a huge fan of the guy. As is director Nancy Meyers; Sinatra often appears in many of her films.
Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The sequence with Nick dancing (albeit, drunkenly) to "I Won't Dance" by Frank Sinatra. However, the scene may also just be Rule of Cool because it is massively fun to watch him dance around with his hat.
Don't Shoot the Message: A common sentiment about the film is that the idea is great and so is the sentiment behind it — a sexist, toxically masculine man who thinks he's a suave womanizer gets the power to hear the thoughts of women, realizes that the women in his life actually kind of hate him, and he learns to see things from a woman's perspective and becomes a better person who treats them nicer. It's the execution that is lacking.
Easily Forgiven: Moments after Nick confesses to having manipulated and gaslit her in order to steal her job (which manages to sound even creepier when he tries to explain what happened without mentioning his literal mind-reading powers he had temporarily acquired—not that she would have believed him if he had told the full truth), she forgives him and accepts him into her heart.
Offending the Creator's Own: Given how infamous the film is for how insanely reliant on negative stereotypes about women it is, it may come as a surprise that the movie was directed and two-thirds written by women (specifically Nancy Meyers as director, Cathy Yuspa and Diane Drake as cowriters).
Older Than They Think: A guy with socializing problems gains the ability to read minds, uses it to improve his social standing, then loses the ability, but gains true love in return. How old do you think it is? At the very least, just undertwo centuries.
two centuries.