The girls are selling brownies! Think they’ll set up a stand in front of a weed dispensary? Will a mention of Michelle and Renault dating in the ’80s obligatorily flash back to the pair sporting shoulder-padded suits and Flock of Seagulls-esque hairdos? Will Michelle, while babysitting Rachel, decide that the two should watch Texas Chainsaw Massacre together? Yes. (At one point, indeed, via an unruly sleeper couch, the film literally throws McCarthy up against a wall-one of its few non-predictable gags, maybe, but one, too, that treats its star like so much human spaghetti.) It’s a whiplash-inducing muddle, pratfalling one moment and heartstring-ing the next.Īnother spaghetti element: the many, many clichés The Boss relies on for its LOLs. And there is, overall, a toss-it-to-see-what-sticks tone to the proceedings. One of The Boss’s other long, drawn-out gags finds Michelle and Claire feeling (and squeezing, and slapping) each others’ breasts-the point of the whole exercise seeming to be the excuse for Michelle to explain to Rachel, when the girl inevitably walks in on them, “We were jostling each other’s bosoms.” There are also jokes about vaginal rejuvenation, and the self-tanning of the crotch, and … well, again, you get the idea. Michelle and the guy who sold her out to the SEC, Renault (Peter Dinklage), used to date we get lots of scenes of them acting on their continued attraction to each other-scenes supposed to be hilarious, apparently, because of the differing proportions of the actors involved.
The movie also takes childish delight in swear-saying of a more figurative variety.
Michelle’s former mentor, Ida (Kathy Bates, excellent but also sadly underused here), refers to Michelle as “a businesswoman, a visionary, a leader” and also “a cocksucker” and “a professional fuckface.” Michelle at one point hisses to an adversary, “You’re a real B-I-T-C-U-N-T.” She announces to Claire, “I’m going to give you a raise so big you’ll cream your jeans and shat your chaps.” There is much more in this vein, but you get the idea. It takes gleeful, snickering, often sneering pleasure in its ability to swear and otherwise be-potty its mouth. The only thing that is very, very clear: The movie revels in its R rating. Instead, The Boss is a whiplash-inducing muddle, pratfalling one moment and heartstring-ing the next. Is it bringing heart to slapstick, the way those other McCarthy vehicles, Spy and The Heat, did so effectively? Is it bringing slapstick to heart, à la Bridesmaids? It’s unclear. And The Boss, for all the star-power the film has behind it-indeed, for all the Melissa McCarthy it has behind it-can’t seem to decide what kind of movie it is. This is all, its weird specificity not withstanding, a promising premise for a wacky comedy: a little bit Troop Beverly Hills, a little bit Bad News Bears, a little bit-via a balletically violent street fight between the Dandelions and the Darlings, whose uniforms channel Che Guevara but whose motivations channel Donald Trump- Reservoir Dogs. The Boss is sketch comedy, with none of the lines colored in. Michelle founds the new group for the same reason she does anything, and everything, else: to make money. Michelle, after happening to sample one of Claire’s “family recipe” brownies, starts a spin-off business, Darnell’s Darlings, recruiting her sellers from the ranks of the Dandelions-the sales are door-to-door, but this time it’s brownies serving as the capitalistic baked good. Michelle takes Rachel to a meeting of her Dandelion (think Girl Scout) troop, where she learns, to her horror, that the girls are regularly selling cookies-at high markups, too!-without directly profiting from the effort. Newly penniless, if not newly humbled, she shows up at the Chicago apartment of her former assistant, Claire (Kristen Bell), and Claire’s tween daughter, Rachel (Ella Anderson), and the two reluctantly take her in. She’s hauled off to minimum-security prison, Stewart-style, for a few months-only to discover, upon her release, that the SEC has repossessed her assets and frozen her accounts. McCarthy plays Michelle Darnell, a self-made tycoon-think Suze Orman meets Martha Stewart meets Tony Robbins meets Tony Wonder-who, as the “47th richest person in America,” is on top of the world … until a rival gets her busted for insider trading.
The latest McCarthy vehicle, The Boss, has revealed another McCarthy talent: the ability to rock a spiky mullet, as well as a series of outfits in the style of “Bedazzled Chico’s,” in a way that manages to be as dignified as it is absurd.