Melissa McCarthy is not playing the standard Melissa McCarthy role in the new Ghostbusters movie. She’s doing exactly that in The Boss, though.
In Ghostbusters, McCarthy will be the lifeforce bringing the new group together through her words of encouragement. If she was playing her normal character, she’d be aggressively insulting instead of complimenting everyone on the team. Her curse words would make even Red Fox spin his grave, and any opportunity for a solid pratfall wouldn’t be passed up.
To some, it is a relief to see McCarthy doing something a little different in Ghostbusters, departing from her brassy persona originated in Bridesmaids and carried on through Identity Thief, The Heat, Tammy and the entire second half of Spy. To others, it’s a shame because when you watch a Melissa McCarthy movie you want to see, well, a Melissa McCarthy movie, i.e., the actress doing the usual shtick you liked before.
Don’t worry. The Boss is 100% a Melissa McCarthy movie in just about every single way imaginable. It’s filled to the brim with insult humor, physical comedy, more insult humor, more scenes of McCarthy falling down, more scenes of McCarthy firing off mean one-liners, more…ah, you get the drill.
McCarthy plays Michelle Darnell, a Paula Dean/Tammy Lynn Baker type who falls from grace and does prison time for white collar crimes. This won’t be her version of Get Hard, though. There will be plenty of similar jokes about the lifestyles of the clueless, douchebag rich, but her prison stay will be short. The actual bulk of the film involves her moving in with a former assistant (Kristen Bell) who’s a single mother with an adorable daughter. Rather quickly, Darnell commandeers the daughter’s Girl Scouts troop and overhauls their strategies for selling cookies, applying all of her ruthless business practices to turning this little troop into a Girl Scouts cookie empire.
And she didn’t even have to guilt a bunch of white, rich people at the Oscars into forking over donations.
At one point, an Anchorman-style rumble will break out between rival Girl Scouts troops. It’ll be the funniest example of little girls getting hit in the face since the final dance sequence in Daddy’s Home.
There might be more to The Boss than the trailer indicates. As was the case with Tammy, The Boss is actually co-written by McCarthy and her husband Ben Falcone, who also served as the director.Tammy came off like a standard McCarthy movie in the trailers but then surprised a lot of people with its sobering reflections on alcoholism and death.The Boss might similarly be about more than just a mean woman in a wig behaving badly and getting away with it because it’s so funny, but at the moment it has the look of an incredibly broad, very R-rated comedy whose existence has been overshadowed by Ghostbusters.
That’s a shame because based on the trailers The Boss looks like the far funnier movie of the two.
The Boss is due out April 8; Ghostbusters comes out July 15.