Let’s start with the obvious: What Women Want—Nancy Meyers’ zany, jumbled, turn-of-the-millennium proto-pop-feminist rom-com—has not aged well. Unlike life in the year 2000, people don’t smoke at work anymore, Meredith Brooks’ “Bitch” is no longer the feminist anthem du jour, and romantic comedies have nearly outgrown Freaky Friday-style mind-switching antics. Yet What Women Want remains the all-time highest-grossing non-franchise film directed by a woman (sorry, Shrek and Pitch Perfect 2). And, for all its many, many shortcomings, it is still an oddly charming exploration of gendered subjectivity (or, to put it in Y2K-speak, ‘what women want.’)

Who better to answer Freud’s famously unanswered question than Mel Gibson as Nick, an ad executive significantly less interested in what women want than what he wants from women (unsurprisingly, sex). Despite being raised by a single mother and surrounded by women at all times, Nick is a chauvinist pig (similarly, the film itself directed and co-written by women, with a roughly 80% female cast—fails the Bechdel test). After he’s passed over for a promotion that goes to hot-shot new girl Darcy (Helen Hunt), Nick attempts to imagine “thinking like a broad” to write a campaign for lipstick. While listening to “Bitch” and waxing his leg, Nick accidentally electrocutes himself, waking up with the ability to hear the thoughts of any woman around him.

Of course, there’s quite a gap between knowing what someone thinks and what they want. Even Darcy scarcely knows what women want: at one point she tries tod esign an ad campaign premised on the (again, very 2000) idea that what women want is “to be online at the airport.” Fortunately for Mel Gibson, he isn’t dealing with ‘women’ inthe complicated, polymorphous sense, but instead an endless series of female characters with pretty transparent desires: Lola (Marisa Tomei), wants to get laid; Erin (Judy Greer), to be noticed; Nick’s daughter Alex (Ashley Johnson), to be loved; and Darcy, (what else?) to ‘have it all.’ Mel saves them all.

Far more insightful than either Gibson or Hunt is director Nancy Meyers—the title What Women Want is more apt as meta-description. Judging by its financial success,What Women Want was what a good number of women wanted: not just another improbable, sappy romance, but a movie where a man actually empathizes with a woman, as Nick does, by fits and starts. What Women Want is broken, backwards, contrived, less-than-halfway cute, and quite literally doing the absolute least it can: showing a man even try to care.