The new Melissa McCarthy superhero comedy Thunder Force arrived this week on Netflix, although sadly, as is the trend with recent McCarthy films, it’s copping an absolute savaging from critics, holding a 34% score on Metacritic and a 25% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Thunder Force is directed by McCarthy’s husband Ben Falcone, aka the guy who played the air marshall from Bridesmaids. Per the official plot summary:
“In a world where supervillains are commonplace, two estranged childhood best friends Lydia (Melissa McCarthy) and Emily (Octavia Spencer) reunite after Emily devises a treatment that gives them the powers to protect their city. While the pair have wildly different personalities — Lydia is a free spirit who leaps without looking and Emily is a meticulous scientist—their lifelong bond of friendship sees them through their adventures.”
That all sounds solid enough, so where did it all go wrong? Jeannette Catsoulis of the New York Times calls the film the latest in a string of “dismal” collaborations between Falcone and McCarthy, saying that the “gifted” actress deserves better at this point.
McCarthy’s husband also directed her in Life of the Party, Tammy, The Boss and last year’s little-seen Superintelligence. While a case could be made for some of those, Vulture‘s Alison Willmore asks:
“How can people who purport to love comedy so much turn out something so lackadaisical and joyless? Especially Melissa McCarthy, a performer who beams out warmth like a SAD lamp, and who’s proven herself capable of making the most underwhelming material funny through sheer force of will.”
Well damn.
Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun Times sums Thunder Force up as “a feeble superhero comedy with lazy, gross-out jokes, mediocre action sequences, some bad sitcom-level acting and the appearance of Jason Bateman as a criminal who has crab legs for arms.”
He laments the fact that so many talented people were involved, as does Mike DeAngelo of The Playlist, who says that the lead actresses are above the “lazy” and “sloppy” material presented here:
“Bad characters? Check! Well-worn, uninventive plot? Check! Forced physical comedy? Check! A big-budget and no oversight? Check! Put all of that together, and what do you get? Another bad Netflix comedy from the makers of other bad comedies. Sorry, McCarthy and Spencer, but you’re better than this.”
Mark Kennedy of the Associated Press agrees that it wastes the talents of Oscar-winner Spencer, saying that Thunder Force is “corny when it needs to be edgy and stupid when it needs to be clever”.
Amidst all of this, there are some slightly more positive reviews. Alonso Duralde of The Wrap said that there are some fun moments of interplay between Spencer and McCarthy, and that the film could serve as a launching pad for future collaborations between the two.
Stephanie Zacharek of Time, who clearly stuck it out to the end, said the film improves as it goes along, writing:
“Thunder Force drags until roughly its last third, and then something remarkable happens: its gonzo spirit kicks in. From that point on, Thunder Force feels crazily, joltingly alive, as if it were realizing, a little too late, that it ought to have been a different movie altogether.”
You can check out more of the slew of bad reviews here, and the film is out now on Netflix if you want to give it a try for yourself.
