The evidence is more than circumstantial: Paul Feig is the Melissa McCarthy-whisperer. Like cooking with rosemary or incorporating tubas into a piece of music, casting the abundantly talented McCarthy in a leading film role takes a very delicate hand. Feig directed her to hilarious effect in Bridesmaids, The Heat and Spy and will hopefully do so again later this year in Ghostbusters. Unfortunately, he was nowhere to be found while the cameras were rolling on The Boss, an unfunny, chaotic mess of ludicrous plotting and tone-deaf set-pieces that’s as bad as her 2013 abomination Identity Thief.
As in that earlier film (which, it must be said, was a tremendous financial success, just in case you needed another reason to weep for the world) McCarthy is a near-sociopath loner that has a particular skillset, but is otherwise completely out of touch with the real world. (She’s never heard of a Dorito before.) When we meet her trimly coiffed, turtleneck-wearing exec Michelle Darnell, she boasts to a packed stadium of acolytes of being one of the richest women in the world, and hawks a “program” to help them make money. This side of her business is never mentioned again, and is just one of dozens of examples of the loose-strings twirling all over the place in the haphazard script written by McCarthy, director Ben Falcone and Steve Mallory.
When we next see Darnell she is barking orders to her beleaguered assistant Claire (Kristen Bell) and sitting for a teeth-whitening session beneath a giant portrait of herself. Her cartoonish nemesis Renault (Peter Dinklage), who spies on her with high-powered binoculars as she takes off in a helicopter, slips the SEC some info and gets her arrested. Renault and Darnell were once an item, and he still has the hots for her, or something. It’s very difficult to discern his motivation, as Dinklage’s performance in this film is so embarrassing it makes his recent turn in the Adam Sandler vehicle Pixels look like Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
When Darnell is eventually released from prison she has no money and nowhere to turn, so she ends up in Claire’s walk-up apartment. The Boss is going for some Great McGinty-esque riches-to-rags-and-back-again story of redemption, the problem is that it takes roughly 40 minutes (I checked) for the first scene with any real laughs. Prior to the moment where Darnell assembles a team of rogue Girl Scouts to hawk Claire’s delicious brownies and interrupts simpering Kristen Schaal’s rival squad with a touch of foul-mouthed Bad News Bears inappropriateness, each drawn-out scene is an exercise in seeing just how unpleasant Melissa McCarthy can be on screen.
At one point during a particularly wretched bit at a country club a character shouts “no one at this table likes you!” It took all my might not to cry out “same goes for us in the theater!” What’s so frustrating is that McCarthy can sell the Bill Murray-esque obnoxious bull-in-the-china shop character and still make her likable. I recently watched The Heat a second time and loved it even more. To watch her flounder with such poor material here is humiliating for all involved.
Many of The Boss’s troubles stem from its constant, unpredictable shifts in tone. It swerves into absurdity, with McCarthy’s Darnell a complete dolt in the Will Ferrell/Zach Galifianakis vein, but will then snap back to present her as a business genius and a warm auntie to Claire and Claire’s daughter. It’s not that The Boss wants to explore the psyche of a capitalist savant, it just is ready, willing and able to ditch all story momentum in pursuit of a cheap joke. The Boss hurls McCarthy down flights of stairs when there’s no opportunity to be clever; one gag literally throws her against the wall, as if the writers could only decide by seeing it if their idea would stick. (Clearly they thought so, as there’s a late-in-the-game callback.) Important characters from Darnell’s backstory (Margo Martindale, Kathy Bates) appear for quick cameos and never return, and the entire film is sloppily patched together with endless shots of Chicago streetscapes set to bland music. Even though so many scenes drag on at awkward lengths, it still feels like so much of this movie was cut out.
Here is as good a point as any to inform that director Ben Falcone is, in fact, McCarthy’s husband. After collaborating on the not-so-hot Tammy and now this disaster, I’d like to suggest that if they want to continue to spend time together on projects they restrict themselves to putting on plays in their backyard for friends and family.
