![\"\"](\"http:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/The-Boss-246x300.jpg\" "\\"The")
<\/p>\nBy Bob Garver<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Boss\u201d is a movie that features a montage of a girl being dumped on an orphanage, Melissa McCarthy break-dancing, an extended mouth-spreader gag, awkward flirting and dating, that gag you\u2019ve seen in the trailers where McCarthy gets launched into a wall by a sofa bed, a crude term for a female fan of Benedict Cumberbatch, a Girl Scout battle royal, a female chest-slapping fight, an adult showing a child \u201cThe Texas Chainsaw Massacre,\u201d a possible poisoning via puffer fish, an exaggerated take on what a burglary will look like, Peter Dinklage in a katana fight, a gross makeout session, and lots and lots of profanity. Some of these are good ideas for gags, some of them aren\u2019t, but most of them aren\u2019t as funny as they could be none of them are connected to each other very well.<\/p>\n
McCarthy stars as Michelle Darnell, millionaire businesswoman and celebrity mogul. In climbing to the top, she took a few shortcuts like stabbing people in the back and dabbling in insider trading. She goes to prison and forfeits most of her assets. She has nowhere to go upon release, and has to move in with her harried former assistant Claire (Kristen Bell) and her daughter Rachel (Ella Anderson). She discovers that Girl Scouts make millions of dollars a year selling cookies, that Claire makes a killer brownie, and that most of the moms in Rachel\u2019s troop are mean. She hatches a business plan: use the Girl Scouts to sell Claire\u2019s brownies and do it independently of the troop so the moms will regret being mean to her. Her nemesis Renault (Dinklage) tries to stop her, even though he\u2019s pretty much already won by ratting her out to the feds.<\/p>\n
The script for this movie needed to be a lot tighter, both in structure and in dialogue. Plot threads come and go without much consequence (is it really that hard to keep aggressive Girl Scouts in your story?), and entire characters are wasted. Margo Martindale plays a nun and the movie can\u2019t think of a single funny thing for her to do. Kathy Bates plays McCarthy\u2019s mentor, and the character exists for no other reason than to get Kathy Bates into this movie. As for the dialogue, the actors are given too much free reign to improvise, and the result is a lot of rambling that makes every scene feel too long.<\/p>\n
Sometimes the unrestricted dialogue ruins good gags, like with the slap-fight that needed to be more spontaneous or the potentially sweet relationship between Claire and her initially-charming boyfriend (Tyler Labine) that gives way to grating clunkiness. Sometimes the dialogue makes bad gags worse. The nickname for Cumberbatch fans isn\u2019t funny the first time, and repeating it doesn\u2019t make it funnier, elsewhere it\u2019s not funny to see McCarthy wearing a mouth-spreader or with her face paralyzed from puffer fish, but the movie thinks it\u2019s funny to keep her talking with her face contorted. And some gags don\u2019t work for other reasons, like how I simply don\u2019t see how a couch bed could launch women into a wall. It\u2019s not one of those Murphy beds that folds down from the wall, it\u2019s a couch bed, it can only collapse in on itself.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Boss\u201d is directed by Ben Falcone, McCarthy\u2019s real-life husband. Maybe that explains the film\u2019s poor pacing, he can\u2019t bear to cut away from his love. They previously worked together on \u201cTammy,\u201d a film so miserable it makes this one much more bearable by comparison. Occasionally here a physical gag will work, like the opening break-dancing or the bloodthirsty Girl Scouts, but still, almost everything spoken falls flat. \u201cThe Boss\u201d is about as much fun as having to go into work on a day off.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
One and a Half Stars out of Five.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Boss\u201d is rated R for sexual content, language and brief drug use. Its running time is 99 minutes.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n