THE BOSS MOVIE 2016 CAST MOVIE
It's been at least since The Heat that she has been, herself, so invested in a part ( Spy is of course a better film overall than The Boss, but by no means is McCarthy the best part of Spy), and while frequent stretches of the movie consist of not one blessed thing past "McCarthy spews imaginative, startlingly mean insults", the passion she has for spewing them is pure and true and intense it radiates off the screen. But anyway, this is all about McCarthy, of course, and she holds nothing back. Not something to take for granted, a good straight man. Mostly McCarthy and Bell, though, and that's a strong enough pairing for the film to generally keep its head above water: playing the straight man is by no stretch of the imagination the best use of Bell's talents, but it's not like she's been getting any better movies roles, and she does have pretty much note-perfect timing for playing against McCarthy's demolishing whirlwind of a character. The film is actually about watching McCarthy curse and fume at Bell, or whatever other actor comes over for a scene or two The Boss has a bad habit of dragging in talented performers to do very little, including Margo Martindale, Kathy Bates, and Kristen Schaal (the last of whom is completely wasted in her two humorless scenes). And it is thus that Michelle will restore her former fortune. Discovering as well that Claire has a killer brownie recipe, Michelle reinvents herself as the authoritarian leader of Darnell's Darlings, an empire of adolescent and pre-adolescent girls selling brownies throughout Chicago (a city where it frankly makes no sense to set any part of this narrative, but McCarthy's from there, and it results in some great location shooting). Reduced to destitution, a post-prison Michelle has nowhere to stay but Claire's couch, and it's from here that she discovers the world of girl scout cookies (but not, in a no-doubt legally-mandated dodge, "Girl Scout" cookies), thanks to Claire's daughter Rachel (Ella Anderson). Then she's nabbed by the federal government for insider trading. The film's hook - calling it a "plot" would be a kindness - is that a certain Michelle Darnell (McCarthy), the 47th-wealthiest woman in America (this says more about me than the movie, but it was that "47th" that made me start to feel good about where things were going: extreme specificity is an underrated source of strength in comedy writing), is an abusive, vulgar tyrant, who treats her long-suffering assistant Claire (Kristen Bell) with extra contempt on top of what she doles out to everyone else. This is obviously a viciously narrow way to praise a film, but comedy is a tricky beast to get a handle on. Or to put it another way, I laughed, and I laughed often enough to conclude that it was a worthwhile comedy, however many borderline-crippling flaws it has here, there, and most places. Melissa McCarthy is actually great in it, however, and that provides enough cover for the film as a whole to achieve some kind of simulation of goodness.