Netflix made something of a big deal out of the fact that the service will be dropping one new movie a week for the entirety of 2021. There are a couple I’d like to see, including the recent I Care A Lot that I have for one reason or another not gotten around to. Why, then did I opt for the new Melissa McCarthy comedy Thunder Force? McCarthy is a talented comedic actress, but her movies (as my friend William Watson observed) fall into two broad categories: bad comedies produced, written and/or directed by McCarthy’s husband Ben Falcone, or some innovative work that really shows what she can do when she pushes herself. Thunder Force, to judge by the trailers, looked an awful lot like the former, even with Falcone getting his customary small role. So, why this one?
I have no real answer aside from the fact it was under two hours and I had time for one movie on Saturday night before doing something else. Might as well knock it out. Besides, I do like superheroes, and there’s something to be said for any movie that makes superheroes out of short, overweight, forty-something women.
In the world of the movie, a cosmic event created something called “miscreants,” superpowered people who run around causing problems. Apparently, none of the small handful of people who gained powers decided to use them for anything but evil. The genius parents of Emily Stanton (Spencer as an adult) were working on a means to combat the miscreant problem when the elevated train they were on was destroyed by some sort of miscreant-caused green fire. Emily is a genius in her own right, but transferring to a new school in Chicago allows her to meet Lydia Berman (McCarthy as an adult), and the two become each other’s only friends until they have a falling out in high school. Years later, Lydia visits Stanton’s big tech company, seeing if her old friend would come to a school reunion. While Emily actually welcomes her friend, she and her associates are in the middle of something and temporarily leave Lydia alone, long enough for the loud working class woman to accidentally set off a series of injections that should give her superstrength. Emily had a second set of experiments to give herself both that and invisibility, but now that Lydia has the one, Emily will take the other, and the two will fight crime as the superheroic Thunder Force.
Good thing too. The local miscreants, including the psychotic Laser (Pom Klementieff) and smalltown gang leader the Crab (Jason Bateman) are running around loose, and someone has to stop them.
There’s a bit more to this that that, but saying more might give away what passes for spoilers in this movie. There really weren’t any real surprises behind anything going on. Falcone, as the writer, may have affection for this genre that he’s sending up, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t telegraph his big reveals to anyone else who might be familiar with the genre. McCarthy, meanwhile, does a lot of her usual shtick, with a good deal of unfunny slapstick and pop culture references that, for some reason, only her character knows (seriously, I can get why Emily teenage daughter may not know who Urkel is, but no one else catches the reference?). I think I saw exactly one moment in the movie, during a climactic superhero battle, that I thought was all that funny.
But what really stings about movies like this is how they waste really talented actors. Spencer is basically there to be a foil to McCarthy. Bateman gives one of his standard lowkey comedic performances that doesn’t work with the outlandish behavior of his costars. Klementieff comes across as someone who might be the main villain in a more serious (if maybe direct-to-DVD) action movie. Melissa Leo, as Emily’s head of security, is completely wasted. And Bobby Cannavale, after getting a decent romantic lead role in McCarthy’s last movie, here is seemingly typecast once more in a role that probably won’t surprise anyone. There’s a good potential movie to be made with all of these actors, including McCarthy, but the plodding, dull Thunder Force isn’t it.
Grade: C-
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