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The Boss is a safe film, and while McCarthy’s may say “fuck” a lot, poke fun at a teenager’s sexuality, or punch a mother in the face, there’s no real sense of trying to shock the audience, which isn’t a crime. The predictability drains the film of its energy so that even the best jokes are reduced to just a chuckle. It’s flimsy, shortcut storytelling that creates a simplistic arc: McCarthy’s character is a jerk to people, those people come to feel sympathy for McCarthy’s character for some reason, McCarthy’s character tries to push those people away, McCarthy’s character realizes she needs friends in her life and becomes a slightly better person. In the case of The Boss as well as her 2013 film Identity Thief, the excuse is McCarthy’s character wasn’t loved enough as a child. McCarthy does insult comedy so well that her movies feel the need to apologize for her character.
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The film is always trying to polish up Michelle, and it’s a pattern we’ve seen with her characters. Michelle basically takes a non-profit organization like the Girl Scouts and becomes the hero by making it for-profit. After Michelle takes Claire’s daughter Rachel ( Ella Anderson) to a Dandelions (a Girl Scouts’ like organization) meeting, Michelle gets the idea to regain her empire by recruiting young girls to sell Claire’s brownies. When she gets out of jail, she seeks help from her former assistant, single mom Claire ( Kirsten Bell), who works at a job she hates and can bake a mean batch of brownies.
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McCarthy plays Michelle Darnell, a business mogul who loses everything when she’s convicted of insider trading (to the film’s credit, it doesn’t try to say she was framed to the film’s discredit, she doesn’t really seem to feel any regret for committing white collar crime). It’s a movie that’s perfectly fine, but it does raise the question of what makes McCarthy a special talent or if she’s just queen of a very limited domain? It’s an R-rated comedy, but none of the R-rated jokes will shock audiences.
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It knows how to use its lead actress and co-writer Melissa McCarthy fairly well while rarely challenging her or pushing her beyond her comfort zone. It’s a movie that exists, and it’s a movie that made me laugh intermittently while I was watching it. There’s nothing particularly bad about Ben Falcone’s The Boss.