Is it possible that Melissa McCarthy's funniest, most memorable
characters are only in Paul Feig movies? It's starting to look that way because Bridesmaids, The Heat, and Spy were her outlandish best, while
her other films have felt like poor attempts to copycat their success. That
includes characters created by McCarthy herself, like the blustering
one-percenter Michelle Darnell in The
Boss. Directed and co-written by McCarthy's husband, Ben Falcone, the film
resembles in all of the worst ways their previous collaboration, the road trip
debacle Tammy, in that
it's never quite as scathing as it wants to be, and isn't heart-warming enough
to be redemptive.
The best scenes in The Boss occur early on as McCarthy is set free
to cut loose in a shower of glorious white collar excess. Looking like the
turtleneck and pantsuit-wearing offspring of Hillary Clinton and Tony Robbins,
Michelle Darnell preaches her brand of "get rich quick" Wall Street
mumbo jumbo to a packed arena. While she preaches that everyone who
follows her plan will get rich, it's really all about showing off just how
disgustingly wealthy she already is, arriving on the back of a flaming phoenix
and boasting that she once paid to have Destiny's Child reunite in her home,
just to watch them break up again.
The redemption process begins early and
hilariously through flashbacks of Michelle as an orphaned child, repeatedly
dumped by parent after parent, turning her into the fiercely independent woman
she would turn out to be. But that isolation has also made her incredibly
self-involved; her office is decked out with huge self-portraits, and she can
barely remember that her beleaguered assistant Claire (Kristen Bell) is a
single mother with her own problems. After Michelle spends four months in
prison for insider trading, she's forced to live in Claire's cramped Chicago
apartment, on a foldout couch that might as well double as a catapult. But it's
there that Michelle has a brilliant money-making idea; use Claire's daughter
Rachel (Ella Anderson) to sell brownies through her Dandelion troop.
Who knew the brownie selling business
could be so cutthroat? Michelle rips up and down the stuck-up moms who refuse
to let their daughters join, erupting into a brawl that nearly puts Anchorman's
star-studded fights to shame, except that it's a bunch of little girls and
women beating up little girls...which is admittedly a little creepy. Michelle
also has run-ins with her former love, Renault (it's really Ronald...from New
Jersey), played by Peter Dinklage, who holds a grudge against her. The problem
is that Renault isn't much of a foe, and when he's gone for long stretches it
doesn't really matter. But Michelle is also only interesting when she has
someone to tear into, be it woman or child. The film's best one-liners (best
saved for maximum laughter) are Michelle's vicious verbal assaults on one
mother played by Bridesmaids and Joy writer Annie Mumolo. She can't
call her tall daughter a "freak" enough, or suggest that she's a
lesbian-in-waiting. And like some of McCarthy's less successful films,
when the jokes dry up she relies on falling flat on her face, with diminishing
results. Physical humor is one of the things she does best, but it's not a
substitute for a lousy script or Falcone's shoddy direction. 
The final act,
which includes an impromptu heist of some important business documents, is
especially barren, except to cement Michelle's unsatisfying change-of-heart. Many of McCarthy's characters undergo a similar transformation, but so little effort is put into redeeming them that it almost never works. Michelle is one of those cases; she's just as terrible and unlikable at the end as she was in the beginning, troubled upbringing or not. And it's not like she just tells one lie or two, she actively destroys lives. Why do we want to root for her?
McCarthy and Falcone have a great
rapport with one another on the big screen, always with him as a character
refusing her sexual advances. They flash that ironic chemistry in The Boss, as well. But as
filmmaking partners it may be a good idea to have more of an open relationship.
Rating: 2 out of 5
