Michelle Darnell (Melissa McCarthy), an even more unlikable version of Suze Orman, loses her entire financial empire after being napped for insider trading. After 5 months of pitifully easy jail time, the white collar parolee lays low at the small Chicago apartment of her former assistant (Kristen Bell) until being motivated to create her own version of the Girl Scouts in order to roll around in green again. THE BOSS is a flummoxing comedy due to the inability of McCarthy and her directing/co-writing husband Ben Falcone to craft stable and substantial material from even its own flat story. Any viewer can connect the dots with how the movie will go but the married couple make it more frustrating with scenes that jump ahead in time, alter from serious to completely cartoonish, and feature little to no visual gags despite having a budget of $30 million. Going into this, do you think this redemption story would end with with a heist plan that would then morph into a katana fight, instead of say Darnell using her business expertise and verbal violence to save the day? Speaking of Darnell, though I severely have an issue with the main story, Darnell herself is the real glowing problem with the picture. McCarthy polishes some of sharper edges of the character with her performance but Darnell still remains to be a mostly insufferable bossy boots from beginning to end. Her sole weakness of a crippling fear of being in a family, due to her personal problems as an orphan kid in the pathetic prologue, is wrapped up with barbed wire, meaning poorly thought out by the script. The only times where you can actually like her, and able to laugh for a change, come when she delivers some smackdown on her former rich "friends", stuffy moms, and the archaic ideals of the girl scouts breeding non-progressive womanhood. Additional smiles and guffaws come from the charming turns of Kristen Schaal, Tyler Labine, and a very committed Peter Dinklage. That much needed humor in this so-called comedy save the film from the scrapheap but just barely.
FINAL REVIEW: 2 / 5
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