Publications
Partners
What it’s about:
This is the not-so-classic story of an orphan turned multimillionaire- Michelle Darnell- who loses it all after being convicted of insider trading and tries to claw her back to the top with by building a brownie empire. She makes some friends on the way and stumbles a whole lot.
What we thought:
Michelle Darnell (played by Melissa McCarthy) is over-the-top but in a way that makes you love her… well a little bit.
Sometimes McCarthy tries too hard to save a film that has gaping plot holes, poor character development and some jokes that just don’t land.
That’s not to say that I hated the film but maybe that I just wish that it had been executed better perhaps with less of a heavy handed approach towards getting the laughs.
Things that might save it are:
Kristen Bell as her unwilling sidekick, Claire who has to give up her sofa to house the hapless-yet-glamorous McCarthy; Bell might just save this film for you because her and McCarthy have a great chemistry on screen. She is the straight man in this outlandish comedy and does that tricky job with a certain amount of panache.
The running gags might save this film for you because some of them are really funny. I won’t spoil the laughs but there’s a bit about Peter Dinklage’s character named Renault being a great lover that is pretty funny.
The parts that might ruin it for you are the jokes that simply aren’t funny, it’s like McCarthy told the rest of the cast who are meant to comic foils to malfunction so that her parts of slapstick humour could seem funnier or make the viewer happier to have slight reprieve.
The best part, I felt, was the brownie war in the suburban streets. When/if you see it you’ll know what I mean.
Should you go watch this movie? I can’t say that I would recommend it over some of McCarthy’s work like Spy. Which I found more consistently funny than this piece.
