Premise: Estranged childhood best friends get super powers in order to stop the sociopathic supervillains in their city.
Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone are finally onto something with their movies. I've made no secret that I hated their first few movies. Tammy, The Boss, and Life of the Party all leaned into the worst of McCarthy's impulses and confirmed my long-held theory that if Melissa McCarthy is the lead creative voice in a movie, then it's going to be bad. That said, the films directed by her husband (Falcone) have gotten incrementally better. With Superintelligence last year, the first Falcone-directed, McCarthy-starring film not written by them, I came away for the first time not hating the movie. It was still a long way off from being good, but "not awful" is a good sign nonetheless.
Their new film, Thunder Force, continues the trend of their films getting just a little bit better. And this one is even written by Falcone. Maybe by their 10th film, I'll be actively enjoying them. Thunder Force seems to recognize what worked about Superintelligence and found a very similar premise. You see, if Melissa McCarthy plays an exceptional mess of a person in everyday life, her character is incredibly unlikeable. If she plays an exceptional mess of a person in an exceptional circumstance, then it's a much better fit. The worlds of Superintelligence and Thunder Force are both so heightened that McCarthy can go nuts without feeling out of place. I'm still not sure that I like it much, but at least it's of a piece.
McCarthy is fine in the movie. She gets a lot of chances to do physical comedy, which you can tell she enjoys doing. She's come to realize that she works well when there's a teen or young child around to match her arrested development with. Her fellow 2011 Supporting Actress nominee Octavia Spencer matches her well. I do wish Spencer's role allowed a little more room for her to have fun too. She's fine as "the responsible one", but she could also be great as part of a Dumb and Dumber pairing with McCarthy. I kind of hope they work together again on something where they aren't playing personality opposites.
It's a shame that I'm just not as tickled by the same things as McCarthy (and Falcone) are. I think McCarthy can be incredibly funny. Her work in Paul Feig's movies is almost uniformly great. Even in a more serious role like Can You Ever Forgive Me? she's often very funny. But, in the movies where she calls the shots, it's a lot of prat falls and gross out humor. Thunder Force tries to get so much mileage out of "McCarthy eating raw chicken is hilarious" and I can't say I agree.
The story of the movie is pretty dumb but intentionally so. I wish it had a little more satire of the superhero movie genre. Instead, it's just piggybacking the genre as a good excuse to make its narrative leaps. Like, how different would this movie really be if it was about Spencer as an undercover detective and McCarthy accidentally identified herself as the cover story character to the crime boss, making Spencer stuck with McCarthy for the rest of the movie? Same basic idea. Only the details of the jokes would be different.
So, not a great movie, but at least it's watchable. It's an encouraging step forward for the McCarthy and Falcone pairing. They are like a sports team that has finally dropped all the bad contracts from their books and needs to start looking for good players to sign. They've figured out how to make a movie with a lead character who I don't fully hate. Now they just need to add better jokes.
Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend
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