'The Boss' review: So, like, how long until 'Ghostbusters' comes out?
In a sea of blandly titled raunchfests -- Neighbors, Sisters, Grown-Ups, Spy -- The Boss still manages to stand out as the most generic title of them all. Which is sort of funny, considering just how strange Melissa McCarthy's latest movie is.
It's a foul-mouthed, R-rated comedy with the soul of a schlocky, mid-career Robin Williams vehicle; a film that takes 10 minutes to explore the comic possibilities of an old bra but hardly cares to explain how its title character made her vast fortune (not to mention the mechanics of how she gets it back); a casually feminist Bechdel-buster that hinges not one but two big punchlines on how hilarious it is when a man gives another man a blow job.
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It meanders amiably from setpiece to setpiece, separating them with long, laugh-free stretches -- until director Ben Falcone seems to remember he's making a broad comedy and sends his star, who also happens to be his wife, tumbling down a flight of stairs.
Maybe the movie's inconsistencies were baked in from the very beginning. It centers on Michelle Darnell, a sort of Donald Trump/Tony Robbins hybrid with Suze Orman hair whom McCarthy first started playing in Groundlings sketches some 15 years ago. That could be why the film often feels like a series of Saturday Night Live bits strung together by the thinnest of thread.
Perhaps it's also why every character besides the long-gestating Michelle can easily be summed up in two words. (Kristen Bell's Claire: "single mom." Ella Anderson's Rachel: "cute kid." Tyler Labine's Mike: "nice guy." Peter Dinklage's Renault: "straight weirdo.")
The plot is slightly more complicated. Our story begins when Michelle, a vaguely defined billionaire -- she owns ... companies? -- gets busted for insider trading and, after the universe's fastest trial, serves the universe's quickest sentence. Upon release, she learns that she's lost all of her assets and status, which leads her to seek refuge with her old assistant, Claire.
From there, the movie basically turns into Troop Beverly Hills, but with more cursing and a corporate intrigue subplot: Inspired by Claire's daughter, Michelle starts a for-profit Girl Scouts clone. Yes, there's a rival troop led by an uptight stick-in-the-mud; yes, the members of "Darnell's Darlings" are a ragtag group of misfits. And yes, Michelle gradually realizes that money isn't as important as love.
McCarthy is engaging as ever throughout, even though Michelle is curiously underdeveloped -- especially for a character who's existed nearly as long as the iPod. We hear a lot about what a shark Michelle is, and how many people in the business world hate her -- but we never see her do anything particularly heinous, beyond yelling obscenities at children.
It's as if McCarthy and Falcone, who wrote the film's script with Steve Mallory, were worried that going deeper would make their leading lady too unlikeable.
That said, it's nice to see the Oscar nominee as a character who's not as one-note grotesque as the title characters she's played in movies like Identity Thief and Tammy; it's also nice that her size is never comic fodder here, or even remarked upon at all. The film does have jokes that land, as well as a stacked cast filled with welcome faces -- Kathy Bates, Margo Martindale, Cecily Strong and Kristen Schaal among them.
Mostly, though, it just feels sort of off -- not outrageous enough to win points for its daring, not warm enough to really win hearts. It doesn't have much to say about capitalism, or business ethics, or female friendship. It does, however, have Peter Dinklage wielding a sword for some reason, if that's what you're into.
In the grand scheme of things, The Boss will be a minor blip in McCarthy's filmography, the sort of movie it's more interesting to dissect than it is to watch. Which is fine; not every comedy can be Bridesmaids, and again, at least it's not Tammy. And hey, she'll get another shot at the gold in just a few months: That's when we'll finally see her in the big Ghostbusters reboot. Doesn't that movie look pretty boss?
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Hillary Busis was Mashable's Deputy Entertainment Editor. Her coverage focused on the film and television industry. A graduate of Columbia, Hillary previously worked as a digital news editor at Entertainment Weekly, where she also cohosted a weekly show on EW's Sirius XM Radio channel. Her work has been featured in Vulture, Slate and the Wall Street Journal, among other publications, and she's also appeared as a guest on the 'Today' show and HuffPost Live.
