Riches Get Stiches

Year: 2016

Director: Ben Falcone

Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Bell, Peter Dinklage

Run Time: 1 hour 39 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Melissa McCarthy is the most important force in modern cinema. OK, maybe that was a wee bit of “this review needs a hook” exaggeration, but she’s certainly in the Top 10. As a cultural figure, she is proving that a woman can lead and, more importantly, succeed in a vulgar film comedy. This might seem like a trivial thing to attach so much importance to, but it’s far from it. She’s opening up a dialogue about women in cinema, sexual agency, and body image, and the best thing is that she’s a genuinely  funny performer. 2015’s Spy may have been the first film to truly get her as a lead, but her continued success speaks volumes.

Of course, every major cinematic icon has their follies. Marlon Brando had The Island of Dr. Moreau. Al Pacino was in Gigli. Robert De Niro perpetrated Dirty Grandpa upon the world. Not to put too fine a point on it, but there’s a reason this discussion is cropping up at the beginning of a review for The Boss. I would scarcely say that the film is as egregious a misstep as the cinematic bile that is Dirty Grandpa, but – you know what? Let’s pick this up in a second. Time to hit the plot.

Let’s crack this puppy open and drink that sweet, sweet story nectar.

In The Boss, Michelle Darnell (Melissa McCarthy) is a grotesquely wealthy woman who doesn’t respect her hardworking assistant Claire (Kristen Bell). Her life gets a bit of the old switcheroo when her ex-lover/business rival Reynault (Peter Dinklage) exposes her for insider trading, sending her to jail and stripping her assets. She is reluctantly taken in by Claire and her daughter Rachel (Ella Anderson), but on a visit to Rachel’s to Totally Not Girl Scouts meeting she gets an idea. With Claire’s help she creates Darnell’s Darlings, a troupe of young women who sell brownies. And thus begins the epic journey of a rich lady gettin’ rich again.

But will she be rich with money or… (drumroll) friendship?

The thing about The Boss is that it’s not terrible, especially not to the degree that critics have been implying. It’s merely generic, which can be just as damning. Here, your average Melissa McCarthy profanity is grafted onto the most sundry family comedy plot imaginable the point that it’s pretty much for no one. It’s too vulgar for the kids who can sit through this kind of plot on the regular and it’s too toothless and predictable for the over 17 crowd. Take out all the F-bombs and sex jokes and you’ve got yourself a Hilary Duff vehicle.

However, I do respect The Boss for being the second McCarthy film in a row that doesn’t mock her weight of integrate it into her character. In fact, she’s playing a highly successful and fashionable woman, which is light years ahead of her previous filmography. Although Michelle Darnell has a predilection for turtlenecks so awful they provide strong evidence for the necessity of capitol punishment, she is a character worthy of Melissa McCarthy, though she’s not in a film that can really support her.

If Ghostbusters doesn’t prove to be the best McCarthy film this year, something will have gone terribly wrong.

For what it is, The Boss is totally fine. While the plot plods along the path everybody knew it would set on from the first frame, the comedy – always a subjective affair – does a decent job of keeping audiences occupied. We get a bit of the old fish out of water gambit, mocking the cluelessness of the rich (Occupy Hollywood!), and some classic “let’s dump the hot blonde in a chunky sweater and call her unattractive!” The best material comes from Tyler Labine, the James Corden-esque love interest for Kristen Bell who brings a much-needed dose of warm, earnest comedy in a register that is actually a little unexpected. For once.

The only comedic element that well and truly rankles is the physical comedy, which follows the recent trend of upsettingly punishing slapstick. Good physical comedy, like The Three Stooges, works well because it exists in a heightened cartoon reality here the characters aren’t actually in physical danger. The Boss is not a prime example of good physical comedy. A little girl fight scene almost gets there, because the filmmakers knew they needed to tiptoe around that one, but Ms. Darnell is run through the wringer, slammed into walls and down concrete stairs with deadly force, the sound design doubling down on sickening thuds and crunches. They’re more like UFC fights than gags, which totally undermines any potential laughs whatsoever.

So much of The Boss is a swing and a miss (an aborted Kathy Bates cameo literally has her abruptly exiting a scene on a galloping horse, there’s a full rap performance, and the climax is a hypercolor nightmare of violent nonsense), but the same genericness that keeps it from being truly great likewise prevents it from totally sucking. It’s a buffer of blandness.

While I should pan The Boss for a woeful misrepresentation of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as a gory movie, cutting between two scenes 45 minutes apart like I wouldn’t f**king notice, there’s enough good here to earn a qualified positive score. Labine is excellent and hopefully this film allows him to reach a wider audience, Ella Anderson is one of the better child actors in recent memory, and the easy emotional beats are far from taxing. If you’re looking for an unstressful time at the movies, you’ve come to the right place. Otherwise, maybe don’t bother with this one.

TL;DR: The Boss is a defanged Melissa McCarthy vehicle that doesn’t really have a place with any audience.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 977

Time And Time Again

Year: 2014

Director: Bryan Singer

Cast: Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Hugh Jackman

Run Time: 2 hours 11 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

The X-Men film franchise has been going strong since its inception in 2000 with two sequels, two Wolverine spinoffs, and a quasi-prequel in 2011's X-Men: First Class. Because of the preponderance of alternate universes in comic books, which provide the source material for these films, First Class and its sequel Days of Future Past take place on an alternate timeline, which helps clear out some of the muck that has backed up over the years.

First Class was an interesting action exercise setting the origin of the X-Men into a historical context alongside the Cuban Missile Crisis. According to the sequel, this sort of mutant Forrest Gumping has continued for the following decade and our favorite heroes and villains have been involved in everything from the Vietnam War to the assassination of JFK.

And the invention of the lava lamp (probably).

All of this meddling has inspired the mutant-hating Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage) to create the Sentinel Program, a highly advanced robotic system designed to trace the X gene and wipe out the mutants before they bring upon the extinction of humanity. When Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) murders him in his office in 1973, instead of stopping his intolerant menace, it merely proves to the government that mutants are a threat and they use her DNA to create Sentinels capable of adapting to any mutant attack.

This sets off a chain of events that leads to more or less the destruction of the entire mutant race and the planet. On the Earth of today, cities are desolate wastelands and the mutants roam the rubble in hordes, constantly on the move to escape the Sentinels that track their every step.

It's a bleak and grey world, but the return of some of the original X-Men cast brings me too much joy to be as disappointed in the state of the planet as I should. Although the roles hardly amount to more than glorified cameos, we get Magneto (Ian McKellen), Professor X (Patrick Stewart), Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page), Storm (Halle Berry), and Iceman (Shawn Ashmore, my one and only) back together again. 

It is enough to make any fan of the original trilogy weep tears of joy that wash away any and all traces of the emotional wreckage that X-Men Origins: Wolverine left in its path.

More than enough.

Kitty Pryde must use her newfound time traveling powers (if you have a complaint about this, please lodge it with Shannon) to send Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back to 1973 and patch things up between ex-lovers friends Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) to unite them in preventing Mystique from carrying out her murderous intentions against Trask and setting the world on a course that leads to ultimate destruction.

But time is limited, you see! The central conceit of the time travel this time around is that Wolverine is sent into a former consciousness, which means that he technically hasn't traveled backwards in time, merely into a shadow of his former self. So as time progresses in 1973, it does so in equal increments in the present day as the Sentinels draw closer and closer to their prey.

This is a genius way of creating a sense of urgency and raising the stakes, although it doesn't quite take until the second act, when cross-cutting becomes more of a prominent phenomenon. Although I do wish we could have spent more time with the original X-Men, this is a devoted sequel to First Class, remaining faithful to that film's characters, themes of discovering one's own identity amid the broad stokes of history, and sizzling homoerotic tension.

I'm serious. You can't make this stuff up.

The film is largely a success, deftly navigating through crackling action sequences and pithy humor with sure footing. In fact, the best scene of the film is a combination of both as the newly introduced Quicksilver (Evan Peters) uses his super speed to greatly amusing and powerful effect. 

Before the film's release, it was doubtful whether Peters would be able to hold his own when performing alongside such giants as Jackman, McKellen, Stewart, and Fassbender, but the kid seamlessly inserts himself into the universe as an important and necessary comic relief. The American Horror Story darling isn't about to get an Oscar nomination any day soon, but he's certainly proved that he is worthy of being respected as a character in his own right and not a one-off annoying cameo.

And that outfit doesn't look as stupid when it's within the context of 1973.

The film as a whole doesn't quite bring itself up to the level of First Class thanks to its reliance on generic screenwriting platitudes to drive the plot forward (there's lots of mumbo-jumbo about hope and the course of time and good vs evil and it's all been done before) and a penchant for overemphasizing certain plot points to make sure the audience gets it. But that doesn't mean that it's not an exciting and viable entry in one of the strongest (and longest-running) comic book film franchises of the century.

But before we go, a quick question. When did CGI get crappy again? We've been coasting along fine for years, but all of a sudden these last couple X-Men movies have been beholden to some truly questionable visual effects. It's not enough to take one out of the story, per se, but it's something to think about.

Let me just say that I am absolutely happy with what we got. A rad mutant power is a rad mutant power. But studios have gotta make sure they render before they export or something, because in a couple years, those plasticky-looking sentinel insides are going to get quite a laugh when viewed on Ultraviolet-restored Mega HD BluRay laser processors, or whatever the hell technology is coming down the pike.

But hey. It's X-Men. Sit back and enjoy the ride.

TL;DR: X-Men: Days of Future Past isn't quite as good as the movie that spawned it, but tells an exciting time travel narrative with compelling characters.
Rating: 7/10
Should I Spend Money On This? Definitely, if you're a fan of the X-Men. If you're not, go catch Godzilla instead.
Word Count: 1053
Reviews In This Series
X-Men (Singer, 2000)
X2: X-Men United (Singer, 2003)
X-Men: The Last Stand (Ratner, 2006)
X-Men: First Class (Vaughn, 2011)
X-Men: Days of Future Past (Singer, 2014)
X-Men: Apocalypse (Singer, 2016)