After stealing the show with her supporting role in Bridesmaids, Melissa McCarthy was all primed and ready to take over the comedy scene in Hollywood. Everybody seemed to want her in their movies. With the right choices, she could have rode that momentum into being a huge star. Problems arose when everything she did after Bridesmaids varied from being awful to mediocre though. In the last couple of years, it’s even felt like she’s wore out her welcome with movie fans and needs a starring role in a great movie fast. Unfortunately, her latest collaboration with her Bridesmaids director, Paul Feig, isn’t that great movie. It falls more in the mediocre section of the comedy spectrum like their other collaboration, The Heat. It’s good enough to watch, but it’s not anything that’s going to stick with you.
McCarthy is playing a CIA agent who’s really good at working on the technical side of things down in the headquarters’ basement, but who doesn’t really have any experience in the field. That all changes when the agent she supports (Jude Law) is killed by a target who has compromised the field agents’ identities though. Suddenly, management needs someone new to go out into the field, and McCarthy is their woman, giving us a fish out of water story ripe with comic potential.
The problem with that is the movie is never as funny as it could have been or needed to be in order to be a truly effective comedy. It’s got a handful of chuckles here and there, but ultimately it gets too caught up in espionage plots and the creation of action scenarios to be truly, powerfully funny. The film was never going to blow anybody’s hair back as an action flick, so it should have stuck to being more broadly comedic. Luckily, though she never produces any big belly laughs, McCarthy is always likable and relatable enough that you root for her characters, so her journey from being an unsure agent to becoming a confident ass-kicker is effective enough to keep the movie from sinking under the weight of its own ambitions. Well, McCarthy’s character work and a couple of awesome supporting performances work in tandem to keep it afloat. Jason Statham and Rose Byrne both play completely ridiculous characters and straight-face-commit to their ridiculousness so much that they become the funniest parts of the film by far. Bless those two.
