So I was dreading this movie, because like… I’ve seen Mrs. Doubtfire, and it was fucking terrible, and so “how about the same premise, except from 10 years earlier?” did not seem like a winning proposition. But, it’s on the list, so we buckled in for a cringe-a-thon.

And then… it wasn’t bad. Unlike Mrs. Doubtfire, it didn’t continually go for the easiest, most obvious joke. Some tedious parts of the premise were just skipped right past, like when Dustin decides that he’s going to do his cross-dressing. There were way fewer (but not zero) gay panic moments than I expected. And one scene where a dude attempts to rape Dustin Hoffman was explicitly not played for laughs, with Dustin Hoffman shutting down a joke on the topic as not appropriate for a serious matter.

Plus, while I’m not a Hoffman fan, the supporting cast was really solid. Like, Bill Murray’s in it, and his Murray-esque reactions to a lot of things make them work about 100x better than they would have without him. Teri Garr (who I have mostly known as one of David Letterman’s frequent guests) has a good character.

There are still things that don’t make any sense — as a woman, Hoffman is a soap opera star, and gets profiles in magazines, but how does a magazine write a profile of a person who doesn’t exist without their fact checkers being like “uh, wait a minute, we can’t verify any of this bio information you have.” And the idea that he could collect paychecks under a fake name with no SSN or whatever only makes sense if you imagine that the world of the early ’80s was way less computerized than modernity, which is probably true.

There’s also some thematic elements that are a little dubious, like how Dustin Hoffman’s character is the first actress ever to be assertive about women’s rights, which is very much a “here honey, let a man show you how to be a woman correctly” kinda thing.

But relative to my extremely low expectations, this was non-terrible. Would I recommend it? Enh, not really. It’s not great or anything. But it’s watchable, which is pretty much a triumph compared to what I was expecting, so I’ll take it.