I was pleased to see that HBO Max, a service I signed up for before it launched and with a catalog I have largely been pleased with, and Roku, the format I use to stream video through my TV, finally came to an agreement that would allow me to watch HBO Max’s stuff on my TV without some kind of work around. Testing the service out, I decided to watch Jackie Chan’s Police Story. I had recently reminded myself how much I enjoyed The Legend of the Drunken Master, so another one of Chan’s Hong Kong martial arts films seemed to be in order…and then as soon as I hit “play,” the app crashed.
Confused, I decided to just reload the app and watch the first movie to come up, and that was Melissa McCarthy’s new comedy Superintelligence.
Carol (McCarthy) is a general do-gooder who works without pay for a different non-profit every day since she quit a tech industry job. After bombing an interview for a dating app, she finds herself being followed by an artificial intelligence, a computer program that somehow gained sentience and prefers to be called a “sueprintelligence” because it reasons that intelligence can’t be artificial. Taking on the voice, and sometimes the face, of James Corden, the one person Carol trusts above all others, the program has decided to follow Carol around through her phone and various devices to try to determine whether or not the intelligence should do one of three options: save humanity, slave humanity, or end humanity. Because Carol is the most average person around, she’s been picked.
Carol finally accepts this is not an elaborate prank and tells her best friend Dennis (Bryan Tyree Henry), a Microsoft programmer. The intelligence doesn’t mind, but at the same time, it wants to go about improving Carol’s life by giving her large sums of money, buying her a make-over and a self-driving car, and doing what it can to get her back with George (Bobby Cannavale), a literature professor Carol broke up with to her personal regret. What does all this have to do with judging humanity? And what happens when Dennis and co-workers tell the government what’s going on? One of those is a good question.
Now, quite frankly, there are two types of Melissa McCarthy movies. There are the ones she makes with her husband Ben Falcone, who often either writes her scripts or outright directs the movies while giving himself a small role, or there are the ones she makes without him where she really stretches her acting chops with something juicy. Superintelligence is one of the former, with Falcone directing and having a small role as a hapless government agent who, with a partner, is keeping an eye on Carol. The problem with these movies is they tend to be very rote, forgettable, and not very funny. It’s the sort of comedy where you don’t need to be told there’s no real danger to the human race and that no matter what happens, Carol and George will be a couple at the end of the movie.
And that is more or less what happens. There’s nothing really funny here, and aside from Cannavale, none of the performances are all that good. It’s nice that McCarthy and Falcone want to work together and keep putting out movies as a couple. Now, if they could just put out a good one once in a while, it would be nice for the rest of us. Superintelligence is rather bland and forgettable, though at least I didn’t actively hate it like I did Life of the Party. I was just bored.
Oh, and it seems that Police Story crashing the HBO app on my Roku Streaming Stick was not a one-time-only occurrence as it happens every time I try to watch the movie off any Roku device. So far, it’s the only thing that crashes the app, but…
Grade: C
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