The Boss

When it comes to com­e­dy, one of the trick­i­er bal­anc­ing acts to pull off is when a film­mak­er is clear­ly aim­ing to deal in both the zany and the sin­cere; going all-out wacky with the com­ic set-pieces, but also want­i­ng to inject a lit­tle pathos into pro­ceed­ings. This is pre­cise­ly what Ben Fal­cone attempts, unsuc­cess­ful­ly, with The Boss, the sec­ond fea­ture he has co-writ­ten and direct­ed for wife Melis­sa McCarthy fol­low­ing 2014’s Tammy.

This did have plen­ty of promise, though. For starters, McCarthy has proven she is adept at play­ing vul­ner­a­ble char­ac­ters while show­cas­ing her flair for phys­i­cal com­e­dy in out­landish sce­nar­ios. So the role of Michelle Dar­nell, a cor­po­rate drag­on lady with a trou­bled past who sets about rebuild­ing her empire and tar­nished rep­u­ta­tion after serv­ing time for insid­er trad­ing, seems right in her wheelhouse.

The trou­ble is that in the film’s floun­der­ing search for a decent laugh, the wack­i­ness is upped to des­per­ate lev­els in the hope that some­thing – any­thing – might stick. So we get a mas­sive street brawl between rival groups of brown­ie-sell­ing school girls to a sharp detour into katana com­bat between McCarthy and Peter Din­klage on a heli­pad. With Fal­cone spend­ing so much of the film try­ing to invest in Darnell’s redemp­tive arc, which con­cerns a sur­ro­gate fam­i­ly bond with for­mer assis­tant Claire (Kris­ten Bell) and her daugh­ter, Rachel, (Ella Ander­son), the clash of tones is just too clum­sy for any of it to work.

Struc­tural­ly speak­ing, the sto­ry feels like it was made up on the fly. One over­long, painful­ly unfun­ny scene of Michelle berat­ing for­mer invest­ment part­ners at a coun­try club ends with her ran­dom­ly falling down a flight of stairs, which then switch­es to two char­ac­ters watch­ing a video of said tum­ble. Imme­di­ate­ly before that, Dar­nell gives her­self a bad spray tan, seem­ing­ly set­ting up a gag where she will turn up to the coun­try club look­ing ridicu­lous­ly dark, thus embar­rass­ing her­self in front of the investors. But the tan ​“gag” is not car­ried over to the next scene. It’s a strange thing watch­ing a com­e­dy about a cor­po­rate mogul that doesn’t even invest in its own jokes.