Over this blog’s lifespan, I have reviewed (almost) every film written and directed by comedian and Melissa McCarthy’s husband Ben Falcone. The only exception is Superintelligence from last year, and that was only because I legally couldn’t leave the house to see it when it came out (not that I’m exactly shedding tears about that development, given how lame the trailers made it look). While I can’t say I have any special affection for his films thus far, and I recognise him being one in a string of filmmakers who seemingly exist only to prop up their spouses, I can’t say I have any real hate for them either. Tammy was alright, The Boss had its fun-crazy moments, and Life Of The Party ultimately got a pass for having its heart in the right place. I am unable to be anywhere near as charitable with his latest, however.
If there’s anything positive I can say about this, it’s that the cast show some real potential within the superhero sub-genre. McCarthy may be coasting on neutral by this point, but everyone else from Octavia Spencer as her partner-in-crime-fighting to Bobby Cannavale as the not-even-trying-to-hide-it villain, even Jason Bateman as The Crab, are pretty dang good in their roles. Or, rather, they do as best as they can considering the limpness of the material provided. But in a way, the potential here only serves to make matters worse, as it instils a wasteful notion in their presence here, as if they could have done better if the folks in charge gave a shit.
And it really doesn’t seem like Falcone did, or at least enough of it to make this worthwhile. As a comedy, it’s yet another line-a-rama slog where the humour doesn’t come naturally from the narrative, but instead from stopping the film dead in its tracks to ramble about anything other than what’s actually going on. It doesn’t help that the bulk of the pop culture references made are at least a decade behind the film’s own timeframe (there’s a lot of '2000-and-late' shit going on here), as if talking about how good Van Halen were in the ‘90s scans in any way whatsoever.
Where it gets worse is that all the superhero shit follows the same pattern of raw artificiality. Everything from the ‘character drama’ to the ‘world-building’, right down to my greatest pet peeve with the inevitable third-act separation, doesn’t happen because they are set up and built up to naturally, but because they have to happen to adhere to the genre formula.
Falcone seems to actively swerve against any and all possibilities to be creative with the premise, up to and including Cannavale’s The King breaking into the hero’s base just so he can declare himself as the bad guy. The closest this gets to a decent idea is the budding relationship between McCarthy’s The Hammer and Bateman’s Crab, and even then, introducing it with a completely-out-of-the-fucking-blue dance number set to You Belong To The City is original only in that others had enough sense not to put this on screen.
Nothing about this feels refined or even prepared for ahead of time; maybe that’s why Falcone and McCarthy’s production company is called On The Day Productions. This wasn’t made because Falcone and company were especially passionate about the material, given how lethargic and self-distracting it turned out, but just to bank on a genre trend at a time when the bigger names are still biding their time for maximum butts in seats. If this were any more disposable, it would’ve been released direct-to-recycle-bin.
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