The Boss

It’ll be 10 years this summer that I’ve been reviewing movies and, lately, when writing, I think of the ways I often repeat myself, like the impossibly numerous times I’ve explained why I give every treacly religious film a fair shake. Or mention how many Nicholas Sparks adaptations I’ve sat through. I bring this up because — once again — I have to explain that I just don’t enjoy watching Melissa McCarthy on the movie screen. I know she’s well-liked in a lot of critical circles (so many reviews are screaming, “She deserves so much better than this film!”), but she does nothing for me. Her style of comedy is loud and garish and she’s often shoved into roles that are unlikable and — at worst — grotesque.

The willful ugliness of 2014’s Tammy, for me, is Exhibit A here — a noisy, mildly hateful and wholly unsympathetic little film that teamed McCarthy up with her husband, the film’s director Ben Falcone. McCarthy’s latest, The Boss, reunites the two on a professional level — which didn’t bode well going into the film. It only had the fact that it was not Tammy. At the very least, The Boss manages to give McCarthy a slightly more palatable character. This isn’t saying much, though, since McCarthy’s titular Tammy sits in my memory as one of film’s least likable creations, an unlikable character who was little more than low-hanging fruit — an assemblage of cheap, annoying jokes based on Tammy’s white trash-ness.

The Boss, at least, attempts to punch up, as McCarthy plays Michelle, a loudmouthed (perhaps you see a pattern here), egomaniacal billionaire who bullies her employees — especially her mealy mouthed assistant Claire (Kristen Bell) — and acts in a generally eccentric manner. This takes a turn, of course, when Michelle gets busted for insider trading — framed by an old flame (Peter Dinklage) — and, after a short prison stint, she must figure a way to rehabilitate her image. This takes the form of taking over Claire’s daughter’s (Ella Anderson) Girl Scout-style troop and reorganizing their brownie sales into a domineering, money-making monstrosity.

The end result of all this, comedy-wise, is a style of humor that relies heavily on lazy randomness, too much slapstick, a tired odd-couple dynamic and the idea that turtlenecks are inherently funny. There are a couple scenes that at least reach a sense of the absurd, but even then the film feels like some warmed-over Will Ferrell vehicle. While not as teeth-grittingly scuzzy as Tammy, the film — despite a somewhat topical subject — has nothing to say, nor does it have much going for it comedy-wise. McCarthy is given little more to do than be loud and unreasonably ridiculous, with the little in the way of craft and thought put into her portrayal. This, unfortunately, is true of much of the film, a movie that at it’s best is little more than silly, and usually nothing besides obnoxious. Rated R for sexual content, language and brief drug use.