I love Melissa McCarthy. She was delightful in Gilmore Girls. She is one of the main reasons why Bridesmaids is one of my top 10 comedies. I like her in her other Paul Feig collaborations (Spy, Ghostbusters, and to a lesser extent The Heat). She's very good in a a more dramatic role in St. Vincent. I love whenever she shows up on SNL. Every time I see her in something, I know that she's going to give the role absolutely everything she's got.
However, if she's the dominant force in a movie, that's a problem. And that isn't to say she shouldn't be the lead. What I mean is, if she is the one calling the shots, that's a problem. She walked all over Identity Thief like the director was afraid to tell her "no" to anything and that movie underwhelmed me greatly. The most disastrous results have come when she co-writes a movie and her husband directs it. Tammy was the first of these collaborations, and I thought that movie was an off-putting mess. The Boss was a slight improvement, but it was still McCarthy trampling over a film with a script that barely held together in the first place. Life of the Party is the third of these movies she's made with her husband. If it's not the worst of the three, it's the most frustrating.
It's a nice enough premise: a mother abruptly splits up with her husband who is in love with another woman then enrolls in college at the same university as her daughter. "Adults in college" isn't a new idea. There's a lot of movies about that. From beginning to end, Life of the Party can't decide what it wants to do with the idea. Characters change wildly from scene to scene as does the way the world responds to those characters. One minute, McCarthy is a carefree, oblivious woman, calling all sorts of attention to herself and high-fiving strangers on the quad. A few minutes later she's having a violent nervous reaction to giving a class presentation. McCarthy will blindly insert herself into her daughter's social life one moment then be embarrassed about it the next. One minute, her daughter is annoyed by her mother being around then the next, she's shockingly cool with it. Every character is like this and it's maddening. I can't even chalk it up to character growth. Characters are wildly going back and fourth depending on what the scene needs for a laugh. The only characters who are free of this are the ones like Matt Walsh as the ex-husband or Julie Bowen as his new wife who are just awful from beginning to end. They don't even seem human. They were awful for the sake of being awful with no depth. Really, none of the characters were believable. A big test of a good character is if you can imagine what they are doing when there aren't on camera. Well, I have no idea how Melissa McCarthy's character functioned as a human for the first 40 years of her life.
As for the story, I must've seen an abbreviated cut of the movie. I'm pretty sure the actual final scene of the movie was missing. In this scene, Melissa McCarthy wakes up. It's only a week after her husband left her, and she realizes that all this nonsense about her returning to college was just a dream. Because that's what this movie is: wish fulfillment. What else would you call a story of a prudish mother who gets invited into her daughter's group of friends, has a handsome boy-toy half her age, and is frequently referred to as her professor's favorite student? McCarthy's character just shows up one day, still comically overbearing and the friends are all like "we're besties now". I think back to Lorelei showing up like that on Gilmore Girls when Rory first moves into the dorm. That too was a little hard to swallow, but that show did a great job showing how Lorelei was naturally a "cool mom" and was quite charming to everyone. The whole joke of McCarthy's character in this is that she's not cool or charming (at least, initially). It makes no sense why the friends would latch onto her so immediately. The same goes for the boy toy. There's some double standard to this, of course. Hundreds of movies have the middle-aged guy with college girls fawning over him. I try to not give those movie a pass either. Life of the Party doesn't put any effort into explaining it. It's not like McCarthy and the college guy love interest even have any chemistry. He's obsessed with her simply because the movie says he should be. I should also mention that too many of the characters in this have overly convenient relatives.
If the theater I was in is any indication, I may be in a relative minority here about the movie. I'm an easy laugh. In a movie theater, I try to laugh as hard and as often as I can. I love being in a theater full of people laughing, so I do what I can to add to that. It is uncommon for me to be the only one not laughing at a movie. However, that happened frequently throughout Life of the Party. People just liked watching Melissa McCarthy doing physical comedy, no matter how little sense it actually made. I was checking my watch while other people were in stitches.
And the movie isn't wholly awful. I still laughed at McCarthy a fair amount. Even maximum McCarthy excess lands a couple good laughs. Maya Rudolph has only a couple scenes as McCarthy's best friend and she makes almost all of them work. She's a gem that the world has never fully appreciated. Gillian Jacobs has a character that doesn't make any sense. Really, it's the pieces of about six different characters rolled into one. A couple of those pieces get some quirky lines reads that I enjoyed. That's all I've got though.
I can't soften this at all. I thought Life of the Party was a lousy movie. There's a Simpsons character named Frank Grimes. Occasionally, I'll hear him referenced as a character type you'll see in other shows or movies. It's a character who is a regular person who suddenly finds himself in the insane world of the TV/movie and doesn't understand how everyone is fine with the insanity. Ben Wayatt or Ann Perkins often filled that role in Parks & Rec, offering the outsider's perspective. A lot of the people who visit Paddy's Pub in It's Always Sunny fill this role. In Life of the Party, I was the Frank Grimes. That movie brought me into a world that didn't make any sense. I didn't match the rythym of the storytelling or understand how any of the characters could function. I spent almost two hours baffled and wondering who thought this was ok.
Verdict (?): Strongly Don't Recommend
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