Delayed Reaction: The Bronze

Premise: A washed-up surly former Bronze medal-winning gymnast begrudgingly agrees to coach a new Olympic hopeful from her home town.

It's really hard to make a lovable asshole. Way harder than it sounds. It requires a performance of near perfect calibration, because this is a character who is supposed to be genuinely awful while never losing the audience. Morris Buttermaker is the gold standard of this. Both actors who have played the role (Walter Matthau, Billy Bob Thornton) are veterans of this kind of character. For every Bad Santa or Bad Teacher who I mostly come away liking, there's a sociopathic Melissa McCarthy character who I can't stand (Identity Thief, Tammy, The Boss).

The Bronze tries to follow in the tradition of lovable assholes by using the site gag of tiny sweet-looking Melissa Rauch as a foul-mouthed curmudgeon. This is a movie I'd been looking forward to for a while. I always liked Rauch on The Big Bang Theory and was curious to see what she was like in center stage. This is also an early Haley Lu Richardson role. It's a very Sundance-y movie, with Gary Cole, Thomas Middleditch, Sebastian Stan, and Cecily Strong all in supporting roles. I also appreciated the 1996 Gymnastics love with Dominique Dawes and Dominique Moceanu showing up. This felt especially appropriate since Rauch's character's Olympic story was inspired by Keri Strugg in '96.

There are some aspects of the movie I really liked. Rauch is 100% committed to the role and isn't afraid at all of how bad she looks. The sex scene involving gymnastics moves was quite funny, even if it was a level of physical comedy that wasn't anywhere else in the movie. Rauch's character's emotional growth is believable. I really liked her speech at the end that nailed home that she was the hometown hero who stayed.

The movie didn't really work though. The secret sauce to Bad News Bears, Bad Santa, Bad Teacher, etc. is how the "Bad" person relates to the young characters. The Bronze is a weird situation because Haley Lu Richardson never really gets to develop any personality and she turns heel at the last second. Richardson tries to make it work, but her character just giggles 90% of the time. There's not much to work with. Richardson's heel-turn is especially damaging for Rauch's redemption. In this kind of movie, the audience uses the approval of the person being mentored to absolve the mentor. In The Bronze, that gets undone because we can't use Richardson as the moral center, which throws the balance off completely.

Probably more importantly though is that not enough in the movie actually made me laugh. Melissa Rauch's lines failed to cross the line from lewd to poetically foul. Thomas Middleditch gave a performance conspicuously free of jokes. I spent most of the movie confused why anyone would put up with Rauch rather than finding her roughish and charming. I'm trying to take a step back and see if this is a gendered thing: Would I be just as turned off if this was a male role? I think so. I'm drawing a blank on movie characters, but Sheldon Cooper (The Big Bang Theory) and Barney Stinson (How I Met Your Mother) both turned me off at different points in those runs when their awfulness went too unchecked. This is certainly one of those movies I'd really love to track down a female take on, to see if it exposes any hypocrisy in myself.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend